AMERICAN  LIBERAL 
EDUCATION 


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LIBRARY 

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SHOET  PAPERS  ON 
AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 


SHORT  PAPERS  ON 

AMEEICAN  LIBERAL 
EDUCATION 


BY 


ANDREW   FLEMING  WEST 

DEAN   OF  THE  GRADUATE  SCHOOL 
PRINCETON  UNIVERSITY 


^      or  THT 

UNIVERSITY 


Si  quid  novisfci  rectius  istis 
Candidus  imperii :  si  nil,  his  utere  mecum. 


CHARLES    SCRIBNER'S    SONS 
NEW  YORK   --..-.    1907 


'■^fiMt 


Copyright,  1901,  hy 
Charles  Scribner's  Sons 

Published,  March,  1907 


TROW  DIRECTORY 

PRINTING  AND   BOOKBINDING  rOMPANV 

NEW  YORK 


PEEFACE 

The  belief  which  underlies  the  several  papers  here 
collected  is  that  the  American  College  is  the  one 
thing  in  our  higher  education  most  worth  maintain- 
ing. Its  first  business  is  to  turn  boys  into  men  by 
teaching  them  the  best  things,  whether  hard  or  easy  to 
learn,  that  they  may  do  the  best  things,  whether  hard 
or  easy  to  do — to  show  them  that  every  difficulty  sur- 
mounted by  well-directed  effort  means  more  power 
to  master  the  greater  difficulties  still  ahead  of  them — 
to  reveal  and  embody  in  them  the  living  and  eternal 
standards  of  thought  and  duty.  Its  constant  foes 
are  the  self-seeking  commercial  spirit  and  the  spirit 
of  self-indulgence;  its  one  friend  is  the  better  self 
in  every  man.  Amid  the  ceaseless  assaults  of  ignor- 
ance, selfishness,  and  weakness  it  stands  as  the  citadel 
of  our  liberal  knowledge.  It  cannot  be  taken  from 
without,  unless  it  is  first  surrendered  from  within. 
It  cannot  be  surrendered  from  within  to  the  forces 
of  ignorance,  selfishness,  and  weakness,  so  long  as  its 
defenders  are  enlightened,  unselfish,  and  vigorous. 

V 


VI  PREFACED 

If  it  is  ever  taken,  there  is  little  use  in  trying  to  find 
another  place  of  sure  defence. 

And  when  it  fails,  fight  as  we  may,  we  die. 
And  while  it  lasts  we  cannot  wholly  end. 

So  serious,  so  inspiring,  so  necessary  is  the  cause  of 

the  American  College. 

Andrew  F.  West. 

Princeton  University, 
February,  1907. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER  PAGE 

1.    The  Tutop.ial  System  in  College  ....  1 

II.    The  Changing  Conception  of  "The  Fac- 
ulty" IN  American  Universities     .     .  25 

III.  True  and  False  Standards  op  Graduate 

Work 47 

IV.  The  Present  Peril  to  Liberal  Education  65 
V.    The  Length  of  the  College  Course     .    .  78 

VI.    The  American  College 89 


THE  TUTORIAL  SYSTEM  IN  COLLEGE  ^ 

This  talk,  I  imagine,  is  in  a  way  a  sequel  to  the  paper 
and  discussion  to  which  you  listened  this  afternoon 
on  the  ever  old  and  ever  new  theme  of  the  large  and 
small  college.  Perhaps  on  that  question  there  are  as 
many  views  as  there  are  minds  that  view  it.  Some- 
where within  that  region  of  discussion  I  firmly  be- 
lieve lies  the  fate  of  the  American  college. 

The  large  college  has  had  the  advantage  over  the 
small  college  of  more  opportunities  and  a  greater 
cosmopolitanism.  The  small  college  has  had  the 
following  advantages  over  the  larger  college:  greater 
accessibility  of  the  opportunities  to  the  student, 
more  definite  and  concentrated  work,  and  a  closer 
personal  touch  with  his  professors.  These  inesti- 
mable advantages  the  larger  colleges  and  universi- 
ties have  been  losing,  and  the  great  aggregate  of 
students  who  flock  to  the  larger  centres  of  learning 
have  been  becoming  less  and  less  an  organized  army 

^  Revised  stenographic  report  of  a  talk  given  at  the  annual 
session  of  the  New  England  Association  of  Colleges  and  Prepara- 
tory Schools  in  Boston,  October  12,  1906. 

1 


2  AMERICAN   LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

of  students  and  more  and  more  a  mere  herd.  What- 
ever he  the  experience  of  other  places,  I  have  no  hesi- 
tation in  saying  that  the  experience  of  Princeton  Uni- 
versity was  that  with  the  rapid  student  growth  there 
came  to  be  less  and  less  attention  given  to  the  indi- 
vidual student's  needs,  and  more  and  more  dispersion 
of  the  individual  students  in  the  masses  of  their  fel- 
lows— so  that  whatever  the  good  of  the  cosmopolitan 
college  fellowship,  and  whatever  good  the  student 
might  chance  to  get  from  the  larger  opportunities,  he 
was  losing  something  priceless,  namely,  definiteness  in 
his  work  and  that  close  personal  touch  of  the  student 
with  the  master,  without  which  the  best  education 
cannot  be  obtained  and  never  is  obtained  all  the  way 
from  the  child  at  the  mother's  knee  to  the  highest 
graduate  student  in  the  most  advanced  subject.  Par- 
don me  if  I  speak  with  some  conviction  on  this,  for  I 
believe  it  fully. 

And  to  speak  as  briefly  and  plainly  as  I  can  of  an 
experiment  we  are  now  making  in  order  to  recover 
what  we  believe  to  have  been  the  priceless  advantage 
of  the  small  college  and  combine  it  with  the  cosmo- 
politanism, the  manifold  opportunity  of  the  larger 
university,  it  was  natural  when  we  thought  over  that 
question  to  look  back  to  the  beginnings  of  the  Ameri- 
can colleges,  and  to  ask  from  what  root  we  had 
sprung.    And  as  we  looked  back  and  read  the  history 


THE  TUTORIAL  SYSTEM  3 

of  the  oldest  collegiate  foundations,  we  soon  discov- 
ered that  one  of  them  started  with  a  president  and 
two  tutors,  and  another  with  a  president  and  one 
tutor,  and  another  with  a  president  who  was  presi- 
dent, faculty,  and  tutor — all  in  one.  But  somehow 
that  little  relic  of  ancestral  English  education  had 
been  lost  sight  of,  and  we  wondered  whether  by  turn- 
ing our  eyes  again  to  the  English  universities,  from 
which,  after  all,  the  American  college  system  has 
sprung,  we  might  not  discover  there  some  helpful  in- 
formation. Naturally  we  turned,  to  make  a  long 
story  short,  to  the  Oxford  tutorial  system. 

It  is  not  easy  to  understand  Oxford,  any  more  than 
it  is  to  understand  England.  Oxford  is  not  a  logical, 
but  an  historical  expression.  It  is  full  of  inconsistent 
coexistences  of  old  and  new,  of  lingering,  apparently 
obsolescent  modes  of  behavior  and  thinking,  side  by 
side  with  the  newest  things  of  modern  life.  You  look 
at  an  Oxford  building.  There  will  be  an  old  piece 
of  the  fourteenth  or  fifteenth  century  somehow 
planted  with  the  newer  eighteenth  century  work ;  old 
and  new  together,  perhaps  incongruous  at  first  sight, 
and  yet  all  blended  and  mellowed  by  the  ivies  and 
vines  and  softened  by  the  effect  of  the  climate.  Such, 
also,  is  the  history  of  Oxford  in  things  intellectual. 
Originally  a  mass  of  Latin  statutes  governed  the  uni- 
versity, replaced  in  part  by  later  statutes  in  English, 


4  AMERICAN    1.IBERAL  EDUCATION 

some  of  them  left  with  the  old  Latin  titles — some  all 
Latin,  some  all  English,  some  all  English  but  with 
the  ancient  head-line  left,  from  reverence  or  forget- 
f Illness.  So  if  you  go  to  the  course  of  study  you  find 
still  lingering  mediaeval  terms,  the  word  "  commence- 
ment,'^ which  we  have  taken,  the  word  "  respon- 
sions  " — and  so  you  might  go  on  to  the  end  of  the 
list — side  by  side  with  the  newest  things.  And  you 
find  a  surging  conflict  of  opinion,  often  ending  in 
compromise,  sometimes  ending  in  the  retreat  of 
knowledge,  at  other  times  ending  in  the  advance  of 
knowledge.  And  so  the  tides  of  Oxford  life  have 
been  flowing  back  and  forth,  and  yet  on  the  whole 
there  is  an  irregularly  increasing  intellectual  gain. 

'NoWj  if  it  is  not  too  much  out  of  the  way,  I  would 
like  to  stop  an  instant  just  to  say  what  was  the  matter 
with  Oxford,  and  how  the  tutorial  system  remedied 
that  trouble.  The  dark  age  of  Oxford  w^as  the  eigh- 
teenth century.  Read  the  pages  of  Gibbon,  Swift, 
and  Adam  Smith.  Any  one  may  look  there  and  see 
how  knowledge  seemed  to  have  vanished.  It  was  a 
place  of  sinecures,  of  ^^  licensed  idleness/'  of  indif- 
ference, of  intellectual  and  moral  decline.  And  yet  it 
was  the  very  time  when  Cambridge  was  at  its  bright- 
est intellectual  eminence.  At  the  opening  of  the  nine- 
teenth century,  it  occurred  to  one  man — a  real  man — 
Evesleigh,  of  Oriel  College,  that  something  was  the 


THE  TUTORIAL  SYSTEM  5 

matter.  And  the  matter  was  that  there  was  no  guar- 
antee of  distinction  to  a  student  who  did  well  in  his 
examinations  and  no  mark  of  reproach  on  him  if  he 
did  ill,  and,  most  charmingly  absurd  of  all,  there  was 
no  security  against  collusion  between  the  students 
and  the  examiners.  It  occurred  to  him  that  the  first 
thing  to  do  was  to  reform  the  system  of  examinations, 
and  thus  straighten  out  the  course  of  study  somewhat. 
He  made  the  attempt,  and  was  successful  in  introduc- 
ing a  reformation  of  the  abuses  that  had  existed. 
Soon  there  sprung  up  in  a  limited  but  brilliant  way 
an  intellectual  revival  in  Oriel  College,  but  it  did 
not  sweep  the  university.  It  was  one  thing  to  reform 
examinations;  it  was  another  thing  to  reform  pro- 
fessors and  students.  It  was  one  thing  to  lead  the 
horse  to  the  water ;  it  was  another  thing  to  make  him 
drink.  And  yet  the  first  step  in  the  right  direction 
had  been  taken  by  abolishing  evils  connected  with 
the  system  of  examining  and  the  course  of  study.  It 
remained  for  Parliament  fifty  years  later  to  make  a 
searching  investigation  into  the  condition  of  the  an- 
cient university  to  go  into  the  reform  of  the  profes- 
sorate and  of  the  fellows,  to  redistribute  the  funds, 
to  abolish  sinecures,  and  to  complete  what  Evesleigh 
at  the  beginning  of  the  century  had  begun. 

But  still  only  the  first  part  of  the  reform  was  ac- 
complished, the  better  organization  of  the  teaching 


6  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

staff,  the  course  of  study  and  the  system  of  examina- 
tions. What  difference  did  it  make  to  a  pleasantly 
idle  student  what  these  things  were,  provided  he  was 
not  interested  ?  Finally — I  cannot  place  the  date  of 
this,  but  give  the  tale  as  I  remember  it — it  occurred 
to  one  man — again  a  real  man — a  young  don  of  Ball- 
iol  College,  that  there  was  no  education  in  the  best 
sense  without  the  one-to-one  contact,  man  to  man,  face 
to  face.  Somehow  in  there,  in  the  literal  handing 
on  of  the  torch  of  knowledge  from  teacher  to  student, 
lay  the  secret.  And  so  Mr.  Jowett  voluntarily  took 
a  few  students  one  by  one  to  meet  him  once  a  week 
and  talk  over  their  individual  difficulties.  He  found 
that  such  and  such  a  man  was  weak  in  his  Greek  syn- 
tax. He  would  set  him  a  page  or  two  of  something 
to  read,  or  to  write  him  a  little  paper  about  it  a  week 
after.  Another  perhaps  was  weak  in  his  logic,  or 
some  part  of  his  logic.  Another  could  not  write  his 
Latin  well.  Another  was  deficient  elsewhere.  He 
talked  over  the  difficulties  with  each  one  separately, 
and  made  them  bring  him — or,  rather,  they  were  will- 
ing to  bring  him — each  week  some  little  attempt  of 
their  own  to  overcome  their  particular  difficulties,  and 
this  attempt  he  would  criticise  and  thus  help  to  set 
them  right.  To  make  a  long  story  short,  it  was  soon 
evident  that  students  taught  in  that  way  were  surpass- 
ing other  students  of  like  natural  ability,  and  after  a 


THE  TUTORIAL  SYSTEM  7 

brief  delay  —  brief  for  Oxford  —  Balliol  College 
adopted  a  tutorial  system,  and  Jowett,  the  famous 
editor  of  Plato,  became  the  master  of  Balliol.  Ball- 
iol men  began  sweeping  the  honors  of  the  university, 
and  to  be  a  Balliol  man  was  to  have  the  blue  ribbon 
of  intellectual  distinction. 

The  next  stage  was  naturally  that  all  the  other  col- 
leges of  Oxford,  in  varying  modes,  adopted  a  tutorial 
plan.  Although  the  principle  on  which  that  tutorial 
system  is  founded  is  as  old  as  human  nature,  and  is 
commonly  supposed  to  be  a  system  of  teaching  which 
has  existed  for  centuries  in  the  University  of  Oxford, 
it  is,  in  fact,  about  the  newest  thing  ancient  Oxford 
has,  the  most  modern  thing  in  it  as  a  well-tested 
actual  piece  of  educational  machinery. 

We  considered  the  Oxford  experience  carefully, 
and  wondered  what  could  be  done  in  an  American 
university  to  produce  similar  results  in  undergi-adu- 
ate  students.  Perhaps  unconsciously,  perhaps  in  part 
consciously,  we  began  repeating  rapidly  to  a  large 
extent  the  experience  of  the  University  of  Oxford. 
First  of  all  we  proceeded  to  reform  our  own  course 
of  study.  I  shall  not  go  into  that  subject  at  length. 
Courses  of  study,  schedules  of  study,  are  perhaps  as 
dry  as  the  tariff  bill  or  an  almanac,  and  yet  they  have 
important  uses.  We  have,  however,  come — and  I 
will  state  this  without  debating  or  arguing  it — to  the 


8  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

following  position;  that  in  organizing  your  scheme 
of  liberal  education  the  four-year  college  course  is  to 
be  retained  at  all  hazards;  secondly,  that  the  earlier 
part  of  the  course  should  consist  mainly  of  prescribed 
studies  of  fundamental  and  general  nature;  thirdly, 
that  the  latter  part  of  the  course  should  consist  of 
studies  of  which  a  majority  lie  in  some  large  depart- 
ment of  the  student's  o^^n  choice,  the  remaining 
courses  being  free — in  other  words,  a  system  of  grad- 
V  ual  and  progressive  election  based  on  a  prescribed 
substratum.  And  in  doing  so  we  organized  these 
studies  under  three  degrees :  first,  the  historical  bach- 
elor of  arts  degree,  retained  in  its  traditional  signifi- 
cance as  including  a  prescribed  training  in  mathe- 
matics and  science,  the  classical  literatures,  modern 
literature,  and  philosophy.  Then  two  modern  bach- 
elor's degrees — one  the  degree  of  bachelor  of  science, 
a  specifically  modern  liberal  degree  for  those  whose 
main  studies  lie  in  the  scientific  direction,  and  the 
other  the  bachelor  of  letters,  a  specifically  modern 
liberal  degi'ee  for  those  whose  studies  lie  mainly  in 
the  humanistic  direction.  In  that  way  we  believe  we 
accommodate  nearly  all  persons  who  may  properly 
ask  to  receive  a  bachelor's  degree  of  any  kind  in  lib- 
eral studies  at  the  close  of  a  four-year  college  course. 
Then  the  question  at  once  arose.  How  shall  we  not 
only  bring  the  course  of  study  to  the  student,  but  do 


THE  TUTORIAL  SYSTEM  9 

the  second  thing,  bring  the  student  to  the  course  of 
study  ?  Let  me  speak  on  that  as  my  principal  theme 
to-night.  The  first  thing  to  be  done  was  to  find  the 
means  necessary  to  secure  the  proper  men  to  do  that 
highly  important  work.  President  Woodrow  Wilson 
at  once  appealed  to  the  alumni  of  the  university 
to  give  $2,500,000,  not  for  bricks  and  mortar,  not 
for  stained  glass  windows  and  chimes  and  gateways 
and  cages  and  base-ball  fields,  and  all  that  sort  of 
thing,  which  so  many  consider  the  essence  of  a  mod- 
ern university,  but  for  the  men  who  were  to  help  in 
this  teaching.  He  appointed  a  committee  of  fifty 
graduates,  with  a  very  capable  chairman,  Mr.  Cleve- 
land Dodge,  of  New  York,  to  prosecute  this  canvass 
over  the  whole  country.  In  a  brief  time  we  received 
subscriptions  sufficient  to  pay  the  entire  expense  of 
the  experiment  for  five  years,  and  a  part,  though  less 
than  the  major  part,  of  the  endowment  necessary  to 
sustain  the  work  in  perpetuity.  That  canvass  is  still 
going  on.  I  want  to  say  that  the  very  first  effect  of 
this,  the  most  immediately  and  obviously  beneficial 
effect,  was  on  our  own  alumni.  They  responded 
quickly  and  splendidly  to  President  Wilson's  insist- 
ent assertion  that  the  invisible  things  were  greater 
than  the  visible.  And  so  they  have  been  willingly 
giving  their  money  to  help  in  this  intimate  education 
of  our  students. 


10  AMERICAN   LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

The  next  thing,  after  we  were  safe  enough  to  go 
ahead,  was  to  select  the  men  who  were  to  do  this 
work.  First  of  all  we  resolved  that  if  the  thing  was 
to  sncceed  at  all,  every  member  of  the  faculty  already 
in  the  faculty  who  was  qualified  should  take  part  in 
it,  from  the  highest  to  the  lowest  officer  of  the  staff 
of  instruction,  and  that  we  should  add  to  them  men 
who  would  have  the  rank  of  assistant  professors,  but 
also  the  function  of  this  close  individual  teaching. 
In  doing  so  we  spent  a  great  deal  of  time,  had  a  great 
deal  of  travel  done  and  a  great  deal  of  conference 
held  in  the  departments,  and  then  searched  the  coun- 
try. We  were  able  to  pay  only  a  moderate  salary  for 
this  service,  valuable  as  it  is — say  $1,500  to  $2,000. 
That  naturally  cut  us  off  from  men  who  were  good 
scholars,  but  had  incumbent  on  them  the  support  of 
a  family.  I  must  say  that  seemed  a  pity.  It  seemed 
like  encouraging  celibacy  again,  and  that  is,  of 
course,  a  terrible  thing  to  do.  But  there  we  were. 
Again,  it  brought  us  face  to  face  with  this  fact,  that 
naturally  the  preceptors  we  should  choose  would  be 
younger  men  as  a  rule,  men,  say,  from  twenty-eight  to 
thirty-five  years  of  age — that  has  been  about  the  run 
of  it — men,  however,  who  had  had  thorough  educa- 
tion, who  had  shown  real  scholarship,  who  had  also 
shown  that  they  were  accessible,  engaging,  interesting 
men,  who  naturally  loved  students.    I  may  say  in  the 


THE  TUTORIAL  SYSTEM  11 

department  of  which  I  am  a  memher  we  considered 
seventy-four  names,  out  of  which  ten  were  chosen. 
We  are  fully  conscious  that  some  of  those  who  were 
not  chosen  were  not  chosen  solely  because  they  had 
been  guilty  of  the  atrocious  crime  of  being  married, 
but  that  wa^  their  fault  and  not  ours.  Still,  leaving 
that  out  of  acaount,  we  made  a  thorough  search,  and 
as  a  result  last  year — and  if  I  may,  let  me  add  in  the 
figures  for  this  year — ^we  have  added  over  fifty  men 
to  the  instructional  force. 

JSTow,  how  did  we  go  to  work  in  apportioning  their 
labor,  and  what  sort  of  labor  is  it  ?  In  the  first  place, 
let  me  say  negatively  a  few  things.  Our  preceptorial 
plan  is  not  class  instruction  in  very  small  divisions, 
excellent  thing  as  that  is.  In  the  next  place,  it  is  not 
"  coaching  "  or  tutoring  individual  students  or  small 
groups  of  students  to  pass  examinations.  What  is  it  ? 
Let  us  go  back  a  minute  and  consider  a  college  class. 
Take  any  class  you  like  —  freshmen,  sophomores, 
juniors,  or  seniors.  Assume  any  number  you  please. 
Suppose  we  take  a  freshman  class,  say  300  men. 
Let  us  assume  they  are  being  taught  in  tw^elve  sec- 
tions or  divisions  of  twenty-five  students  in  the  class- 
room, which  is  about  our  practice  in  the  freshman 
year.  What  then?  How  does  the  preceptorial  work 
touch  them  ? 

I  may  say  incidentally  that  it  was  clear  immedi- 


12  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

ately  we  could  not  do  one  thing — a  thing,  by  the  way, 
that  seems  to  me  a  great  advantage  in  the  Oxford 
plan.  We  could  not  find  preceptors  or  tutors  who 
could  take  any  given  student  in  all  his  studies.  Of 
course  you  realize  that  this  is  done  in  Oxford.  The 
students  of  the  University  of  Oxford  divide  into  two 
sets,  the  Passmen,  those  who  are  striving  simply  to 
get  through,  and  the  Classmen,  those  who  are  striving 
for  honors.  The  Passman  has  a  very  limited  range 
of  subjects.  In  Oxford  the  student  who  will  not 
work  is  given  less  freedom,  an  idea  which  does  seem 
to  me  well  worthy  of  imitation  here.  Freedom  is 
for  the  man  who  will  work.  The  Classman  is  the 
man  who  will  work.  Very  good.  Your  Passman 
enters  Oxford,  has  his  classics,  his  mathematics,  his 
elements  of  natural  philosophy  and  logic,  and  so  on — 
practically  a  very  limited  range  to  begin  with.  Their 
system  of  education  trains  men  who  can  supervise 
that  restricted  range  of  studies.  So  could  our  men, 
if  that  had  been  our  mode  of  training.  But  it  has 
not  been.  It  would  take  some  time  to  get  it  estab- 
lished, if  it  were  necessary  to  establish  it.^ 

The  Classman  in  Oxford  concentrates  his  work  in 

some  one  important  field,  such  as  modern  history, 

literce  humaniores,  or  natural  science,   and  he  has 

''one  person  to  guide  him  in  that  field.     That  is  the 

way  they  provide  for  the  Classmen., 


THE  TUTORIAL  SYSTEM  1 


o 


We  solved  our  problem  in  the  following  way.  Our 
freshmen  and  sophomores  are  to  have,  and  do  have, 
one  hour  a  week  with  the  preceptor  in  each  leading 
subject.  For  example,  freshmen  who  are  candidates 
for  the  degree  of  B.A.  have  one  hour  a  week  precep- 
toriallj  in  Latin,  one  in  Greek,  one  in  mathematics, 
one  in  a  modern  language,  one  in  English.  Our 
freshmen  candidates  for  the  degree  of  Bachelor  of 
Science  will  have  one  preceptorial  hour  a  week  in 
Latin,  one  in  French,  one  in  German,  one  in  mathe- 
matics, one  in  physics,  and  one  in  English.  Al- 
though it  is  not  rigorously  true — it  is  not  quite  true 
of  freshmen — let  us  assume  what  is  the  fact  now 
generally  throughout  the  course  of  study  that  we 
have  the  fifteen-hour  schedule,  composed  of  five 
three-hour  courses.  We  take  one  hour  off  the  class- 
room instruction  and  give  it  to  preceptorial  work, 
so  that  in  a  three-hour  course  there  will  be  two  hours 
in  the  classroom  and  one  hour  with  the  preceptor. 

^ow  let  us  see  how  the  preceptorial  hour  works  in 
a  particular  course  and  in  the  freshman  year,  though 
the  unit  there  happens  to  be  four  hours  in  some  sub- 
jects and  two  in  others.  How  do  we  do  it?  It  is 
mechanically  practicable  to  take  a  class  division  of 
twenty-five  men  in  any  course  and  schedule  them,  say, 
on  Monday,  Tuesday,  Wednesday — three  hours.  The 
first  and  second  of  these  hours  go  to  class  instruction. 


14  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

the  third  hour  to  preceptorial  work.  But  how  ?  In 
the  following  way:  Take  that  division  of  twenty- 
five,  break  it  into  six  little  clumps  of,  say,  four  stu- 
dents each,  and  put  six  preceptors  simultaneously  at 
work  during  that  third  hour.  That  is  an  obvious, 
simple,  mechanical  device,  but  one  which  is  to  us  of 
the  greatest  service.  We  can,  of  course,  get  any  class 
division  of  twenty-five  freshmen  fairly  homogeneous. 
We  then  divide  the  division  into  six  groups,  which 
will  average  four  men  apiece,  and  that  is  on  the  whole 
the  prevailing  unit  in  our  preceptorial  unit,  groups 
of  four  men.  We  did  not  quite  get  to  "  blocks  of 
^ye.^^  We  should  be  pleased  to  hare  groups  of  three, 
if  we  could  have  enough  preceptors  to  attend  to  them, 
or  even  two,  or  one,  but  we  have  not. 

"Now  it  is  evident  that  in  any  well-regulated  time- 
table you  can  divide  300  students  in  any  subject  into 
twelve  homogeneous  divisions  of  twenty-five,  provided 
you  arrange  things  so  that  each  leading  subject  di- 
vides independently  of  the  others,  and  solely  ac- 
cording to  the  merits  of  the  men  in  that  subject. 
Your  first  or  highest  division  will  thus  contain  the 
very  finest  students.  Your  second  division  will  be, 
on  the  whole,  the  next  finest  set.  And  as  you  go 
on  down  your  list  of  divisions  you  soon  begin  to 
get  to  high  mediocrity,  then  dull  mediocrity,  deadly 
mediocrity,    hopeless    inferiority,    and    at    last    the 


THE  TUTORIAL  SYSTEM  15 

abyss.  At  the  top  you  have  the  homogeneity  of 
knowledge  as  the  common  distinguishing  mark ;  at  the 
bottom  you  have  the  heterogeneity  of  ignorance.  At 
the  top  there  is  no  trouble ;  because  all  know,  know 
well  and  know  together,  and  go  like  race-horses.  We 
never  have  had  trouble  with  any  top  division.  At 
the  bottom  it  is  not  so  much  a  question  of  finding  out 
the  sum  of  what  they  know,  but  of  finding  out  the 
character  of  the  ignorance  with  which  you  have  to 
deal  in  each  case.  If  you  can  diagnose  that,  then 
you  can  save  the  lowest  division. 

How  interesting  the  lowest  division  is !  Give  me 
the  head  and  tail  of  a  class,  not  the  middle.  At  the 
top  are  the  fine  spirited  fellows,  who  cannot  be  held 
in,  who  need  the  rein.  In  the  lowest  division  they 
need  the  spur.  That  lowest  division,  though,  what- 
ever the  subject  is,  contains  those  who  are  most  evi- 
dently, painfully,  woefully,  in  need  of  preceptorial 
instruction.  Yet  it  contains  some  of  the  most  in- 
teresting and  lovable  fellows  that  ever  come  to 
college.  That  lowest  division  contains  the  mature 
fellow,  with  dull  mind  and  poor  preparation,  who  is 
trying  hard.  It  contains  the  young  fellow  who  has 
gotten  too  quickly  into  college  and  is  only  half  ready 
for  the  burden.  It  also  contains  the  really  able  fel- 
low, who  has  had  a  good  preparation,  but  does  not 
mean  to  study.     Those  are  the  three  kinds.    I  think 


16  AMERICAN   LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

there    are    no    other    kinds    found    in    the    lowest 
division. 

Well,  then  what?  Take  any  of  those  class  di- 
visions— high  or  low.  Assume  that  each  division  of 
twenty-five  men  is  as  homogeneous  as  it  can  be  made. 
Then  take  each  division  and  break  it  into  six  clumps, 
clusters,  little  tiny  groups  or  sets  of  four  students, 
and  you  are  able,  if  you  put  six  preceptors  at  work 
simultaneously — each  with  one  of  the  clumps  of  four 
— to  treat  preceptorially  the  entire  class  division  at 
the  same  hour.  It  is  also  possible  to  shift  any  in- 
dividual back  and  forth  from  one  to  another  of  these 
preceptorial  groups,  if  occasion  arises.  What  then? 
During  the  first  two  or  three  weeks  of  the  term  the 
members  of  the  preceptorial  groups  which  compose 
that  lowest  division — and  there  is  the  whole  crucial 
test,  of  course — usually  have  to  be  taken  tandem. 
They  are  all  alike  in  being  deficient,  but  unlike  in 
the  kind  of  ignorance  they  show.  If  you  have 
an  hour  for  four  such  men,  give  each  one  fifteen 
minutes  the  first  day.  Perhaps  a  week  or  two 
later  you  will  be  able  to  put  two  of  them  together, 
and  the  other  two  will  still  be  taken  separately. 
Perhaps  you  will  find  one  of  your  colleagues  has 
a  man  he  would  like  to  trade  with  you.  Perhaps 
you  can  make  the  shift.  Of  course  these  six  pre- 
ceptors can  easily  meet,  talk  over  their  little  blocks 


THE  TUTORIAL  SYSTEM  17 

of  four,  and  in  the  course  of  a  montli  the  blocks  of 
four  may  be  so  redistributed  as  to  assume  something 
of  homogeneity.  If,  for  example,  it  be  even  the  man 
who  cannot  tell  the  difference  in  algebra  between  mul- 
tiplication and  addition,  as  I  fear  some  cannot,  or  if 
it  be  the  person  who  cannot  master  the  irregular  verbs 
in  Latin,  as  even  the  poet  Heine  admitted  with  tears 
he  could  not — no  matter  who  it  is,  we  have  now  gotten 
hold  of  the  means  of  sorting  him  as  nearly  as  possible 
into  the  exact  place  where  he  belongs.  And,  of  course, 
as  a  month  passes  on,  or  two  months  pass  on,  more 
and  more  this  group  of  men  who  are  badly  deficient, 
this  little  set  of  four,  have  been  put  together,  perhaps 
shifted  round  from  one  group  into  another,  till  they 
have  got  into  just  the  right  place,  and  they  are  being 
treated  by  some  one  who  is  guide,  philosopher,  friend, 
critic,  doctor,  and  politician  all  in  one,  and  in  a  short 
time  those  fellows  show  the  result. 

ISTow,  how  do  they  show  the  result  ?  I  said  this  was 
not  a  system  class  instruction  by  small  divisions  and 
that  it  was  not  a  system  of  coaching  for  examination. 
What  is  it  ?  It  is  not  in  any  sense  coaching  or  tutor- 
ing on  the  course  of  study  to  which  the  preceptorial 
hour  is  related ;  but  it  is  reenforcing  the  course  of 
study  by  instruction,  so  to  speak,  ^'  on  the  side."  Let 
us  suppose  a  case  of  a  student  in  Latin.  He  comes 
to  reading  his  Livy.     He  has  fallen  into  the  Serbo- 


18  AMERICAN   LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

nian  bog  of  trouble,  namely,  the  subjunctive.  I  don't 
care  how  lamentable  his  difficulty,  his  preceptor  takes 
him  and  makes  the  difficulty  as  plain  as  he  can  make 
it  by  talking  straight  from  one  man  to  the  other.  He 
sets  him  something  to  write.  He  sets  him  to  "  making 
his  Latinos  "  as — who  was  it  ?  the  great  old  school- 
master, Roger  Ascham,  said,  "  making  his  Latinos." 
And  so  in  a  short  time  he  is  taken  out  of  the  bog,  his 
feet  are  set  on  a  rock,  and  a  song  of  rejoicing  is  in  his 
mouth.  In  other  words,  in  the  course  in  Livy,  the 
preceptorial  hour  is  given  to  instruction  of  freshmen 
in  the  Latin  language,  according  to  the  individual 
need  of  each  one.  The  stuff  that  is  used  to  teach  him 
the  language  is  the  text  of  Livy,  and  his  illustrations 
will  be  taken,  his  examples  taken,  the  stuff  out  of 
which  some  English  will  be  given  for  him  to  make 
into  Latin,  if  you  like,  will  be  taken  from  Livy,  and 
in  that  sense  it  is  related  directly  to  the  course.  And 
yet  perhaps  no  two  men,  certainly  no  two  blocks  of 
students,  have  precisely  the  same  area  of  instruction. 
The  area  of  the  preceptor's  effort  is  the  varying  area 
of  each  student's  special  need. 

Let  us  recapitulate  for  a  moment.  We  divide  the 
800  into  twelve  homogeneous  class  divisions.  We  di- 
vide each  class  division  into  six  preceptorial  groups, 
according  to  the  example  I  have  given,  ^ow,  that  is 
not  the  rule  in  all  departments.    In  some  departments 


THE  TUTORIAL  SYSTEM  19 

we  have  not  enough  men  to  do  that  but  something  of 
that  sort  is  our  aim,  and  to  a  very  large  degree  we  are 
realizing  that  aim. 

How  did  we  know  the  students  were  going  to  like 
it  ?  We  did  not.  When  the  first  academic  procession 
of  the  faculty  took  place,  with  the  host  of  new  pre- 
ceptors added,  the  university  turned  out  as  though  to 
see  what  sort  of  a  new  reenforcement  we  had  secured 
for  our  intellectual  foot-hall  team.  The  curiosity 
with  which  our  students  watched  the  rejuvenated 
faculty  was  well  worth  looking  at. 

To  go  on  with  our  theme :  'No  preceptor  marks  his 
students  on  their  preceptorial  work.  No  student  is 
bound  to  be  there,  but  if  he  is  not  there  he  will  not 
be  examined.  What  a  combination  of  foreordination 
and  election  it  is!  If  the  preceptor  cannot  say  his 
preceptee — pardon  the  word  "  preceptee  " — has  tried 
to  do  satisfactory  work  durmg  the  term,  the  Depart- 
ment is  not  likelv  to  examine  him.  What  a  lot  of 
trouble  that  saves  !  I  have  in  mind,  however,  the  first 
result,  at  the  end  of  the  first  term  when  this  plan  was 
started  last  year.  In  one  Department,  which  enrolled 
700  students,  the  total  number  of  men  who  had  to  be 
excluded  from  examination,  because  they  had  not  at- 
tended to  the  preceptorial  work  with  sufficient  fidelity 
and  intelligence  to  satisfy  the  Department,  was  only 
sixteen.    We  never  had  such  a  record  in  our  history. 


20  AMERICAN   LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

Why  ?  First,  because  the  men  found  study  interest- 
ing; second,  because  they  liked  the  men  who  taught 
them,  and,  third,  because  they  knew  it  was  fair  that 
the  university  should  not  waste  its  time  on  them  if 
they  did  not  respond. 

Many  interesting  things  have  grown  out  of  this. 
Students  are  wonderfully  complex  beings — frank,  ir- 
reverent, loyal,  careless,  optimistic,  adventurous, 
lovable — ^boys  turning  into  men.  They  begin  to  es- 
tablish their  own  traditions,  what  they  call  immemo- 
rial traditions,  which  are  made  very  quickly  in  college 
life,  a  college  generation  being  only  four  years,  and 
the  memory  of  a  college  generation  being  just  four 
years  long.  What  then  ?  After  a  while  the  fellows 
get  to  thinking,  "  Well,  what  a  really  pleasant  thing 
this  is.  We  four  are  just  a  little  club,  with  Professor 
So-and-so  up  in  his  room.  If  we  care  to  smoke,  we 
can  do  it."  Nothing  is  said  about  that — nothing  said 
one  way  or  the  other.  "  We  sit  around  the  table.  We 
go  over  questions  of  interest.  One  is  set  to  criticising 
the  other,  he  to  criticising  all  of  us."  What  happens 
in  the  term?  Perhaps  somebody  is  dropped  out  of 
that  group,  perhaps  dropped  out  of  college.  Por 
whatever  reason,  he  has  disappeared.  A  new  one  en- 
ters. He  is  received  with  curious  feelings.  "  What 
business  has  he  to  come  into  our  group  ?  This  belongs 
to  us.     This  is  our  privilege."     I  would  not  destroy 


THE  TUTORIAL  SYSTEM  21 

that  feeling  in  their  minds  for  anything,  the  feeling 
that  they  have  something  that  is  their  own,  that  they 
have  got  something  worth  while.  That  is  a  good 
thing.  "  And  who  is  this  man  to  come  in  ? "  is  a 
very  pardonable  question  for  them  to  ask.  How 
much  better  than  if  they  were  all  scurrying  to  get 
out  of  the  group  as  fast  as  possible.  What  wonderful 
fellows  students  are! 

There  are  some  tests  we  can  mention  as  indicating 
the  immediate  effect  of  the  preceptorial  teaching  in 
its  first  year  in  Princeton.  One  is  the  test  of  the  use 
of  books  in  the  university  library.  If  there  is  any- 
thing obvious  to  be  said  about  the  intellectual  condi- 
tion of  our  American  students  to-day,  it  is  that  there 
is  a  sense  in  which  they  are  illiterate.  Splendid  fel- 
lows— but  are  they  reading  men  ?  A  man  that  does 
not  like  to  read  ought  not  to  be  called  a  student.  How 
easy  to  read  the  newspapers,  to  read  the  athletic  news, 
sometimes  magazine  articles,  occasionally  a  book — a 
novel.  But  is  it  true  that  this  generation  is  brought 
up  to  read  good  literature  ?  I  am  not  a  pessimist — 
far  from  it.  Yet  when  I  see  the  statistics  collected 
in  various  colleges  showing  the  abysmal  ignorance 
that  exists  regarding  the  greatest  book  of  our  litera- 
ture, the  English  Bible,  somehow  I  feel  that  we  have 
been  losing  good  literature  in  our  homes,  in  our  in- 
tercourse, in  our  colleges,  in  all  our  life.    Kow,  one  of 


22  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

the  charming  and  delightful  sides  of  this  preceptorial 
question  is  the  strong  emphasis  we  lay  on  reading, 
particularly  in  the  upper  years,  and  to  some  extent 
in  the  lower  years.  Perhaps  we  are  giving  them  too 
much  to  read ;  I  fear  we  are.  In  our  desire  to  make 
things  work,  we  are  crowding  them  a  little.  The  uni- 
versity library  proceeded  to  get  plenty  of  sets  of 
books,  so  that  our  students  should  not  be  compelled 
to  spend  their  money  too  freely  on  the  books  that  were 
set  alongside  of  their  courses.  It  kept  account  of  the 
books  that  were  used.  The  average  use  of  the  univer- 
sity library  on  the  part  of  undergraduates  the  first 
term  the  preceptorial  system  went  into  effect  in- 
creased heavily.  I  think  we  can  say  the  books  that 
were  taken  out  in  abundance  were  books  of  history, 
books  of  philosophy,  books  of  literature,  books  of 
science — books  that  ought  to  be  the  natural  reading  of 
a  man  who  calls  himself  a  student. 

A  second,  and  even  a  more  subtle  test,  is  the  chang- 
ing character  of  conversation  on  the  campus,  at  the  so- 
called  "  eating  clubs  " — what  a  dreadful  name  for  a 
club.  Things  intellectual  are  now  in  good  form — if 
spoken  of  without  affectation.  I  could  tell  stories  of 
students  whom  I  know  well  that  would  come  only  too 
close  home.  Some  of  them  had  got  in  the  way  of 
thinking  that  it  was  not  the  thing,  you  know,  to  be 
studying  too  much,  the  thing  was  to  enjoy  your  good 


or  / 

^^'^^^^^^^''^    THE  TUTORIAL  SYSTEM  23 

comradesliip,  to  study  some,  as  much  as  might  become 
a  gentleman — no  more — but  not  to  throw  yourself 
heart  and  soul  into  the  best  knowledge,  not  to  make 
the  acquaintance  of  the  great  masters  of  thought  and 
fancy,  not  to  open  the  mind,  but  to  grow  up,  as  one 
very  wise  English  critic  said,  with  "  undeveloped 
mind,"  with  boys'  minds  in  men's  bodies.  That  is 
changing.  The  talk  is  more  and  more  of  things  in- 
tellectual. Even  tangents  and  cosines  sometimes  fly 
around  the  campus.  I  don't  mean  for  a  moment  to 
say  that  they  won't  talk  a  lot  of  other  things — far 
from  it.  I  do  mean  to  say  that  there  is  some  talk  of 
these  things  daily  at  the  table,  in  the  walking  by  twos 
and  threes,  in  animated  informal  discussion — just  the 
thing  we  want.  And  out  of  that  is  coming — what? 
I  fully  believe  there  is  coming  the  recovery  of  the  lost 
art  of  conversation. 

Then  a  third  thing,  and  I  have  done.  Perhaps  the 
most  visibly  notable  thing  is  the  effect  on  the  uni- 
versity when  evening  comes.  A  great  number  of 
lights  in  the  rooms,  the  comparative  absence  of  stroll- 
ing, roaming  crowds — the  greater  quietude — the  gen- 
eral air.  What  shall  I  say  ?  Is  it  the  atmosphere  of 
study  that  is  brooding  and  settling  over  the  old  halls 
in  the  evening  ?    I  think  it  is. 

ISTow,  ladies  and  gentlemen,  as  far  as  a  man  can  try 
who  believes  in  a  thing  so  much  that  he  is  in  danger 


24  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

of  speaking  as  an  advocate  rather  than  as  a  judge,  I 
have  tried  to  state  fairly,  if  I  could,  the  results  of  our 
first  year.  It  has  succeeded  beyond  what  we  ex- 
pected. It  has  not  fully  succeeded  yet.  Many  diffi- 
culties arise  from  the  first  application  that  have  still 
to  be  worked  out.  Eut  we  are  so  encouraged  as  to 
believe  that  we  are  recovering,  at  least  for  Princeton, 
the  lost  priceless  benefit  of  the  small  college  in  the 
larger  university.  If  so,  we  somehow  feel  that  we 
are  doing  the  rank  and  file  of  our  students  a  greater 
service  than  by  any  other  device  we  can  think  of  to 
put  in  operation — any  device  that  is  in  any  way 
within  our  reach. 


II 


THE  CHAXGmG  COj^CEPTIOIsT  OE  "THE 
FACULTY "  IE"  AMERICAN  U:^IVER- 
SITIES  1 

I 

The  original  faculty,  and  still  the  necessarily  central 
faculty  of  Arts  and  Sciences — the  old  "  college  fac- 
ulty "  with  all  that  growth  outward  and  upward  has 
added — is  as  much  as  this  short  paper  can  sketch, 
even  in  bare  outline.  Within  our  generation  it  has 
greatly  changed.  It  is  our  purpose  to  show  not  so 
much  the  history  of  that  change  as  the  present  situa- 
tion and  some  of  its  implications. 

The  living  root  of  the  old  faculty,  as  of  every  other 
part  of  the  college,  was  a  distinctively  Christian  im- 
pulse. It  was  the  belief  that  in  serving  the  cause  of 
knowledge  and  truth  by  promoting  liberal  education 
men  were  serving  the  cause  of  Christ.  Presidents, 
trustees,  and  professors  were  alike  to  give  themselves 
in  self-denial  to  their  several  tasks,  mindful  that  this 
holy  ideal  was  to  guide  and  ennoble  their  every  effort. 

*  A  paper  read  before  the  Association  of  American  Universities 
at  the  annual  meeting  in  San  Francisco,  March  17,  1906. 

25 


26  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

And  the  old  root  flowered  many  a  time  in  lives  of 
strength  and  loveliness  that  remain  as  the  fairest 
memories  of  the  older  period.  Yet  perhaps  the  ideal 
was  too  high  ever  to  be  realized  generally  by  men  as 
men  were  and  still  are.  Certainly  it  is  an  infinite 
pity  that  a  narrow  particularism,  an  insistence  on  the 
local  and  clannish,  and  a  consequent  sectarian  war- 
fare, somewhat  mitigated  by  common  sense  and  kind- 
liness, so  often  disfigured  the  old  college  that  its 
power  for  good  was  lessened.  Let  us  make  these 
abatements  freely,  and  yet  gratefully  remember  that 
the  old  college  faculty  at  least  professed  and  tried  to 
show  that  God  is  the  end  of  all  our  knowing  and  that 
Christ  is  the  Master  of  the  Schools. 

With  this  ideal,  then  as  now,  the  fiercely  practical 
side  of  our  American  temper  was  found  to  be  at  vari- 
ance. The  sense  of  achievement  in  visible  things 
fought  against  faith  in  the  invisible.  A  nation  had 
been  made  and  kept  together.  Society  had  been  '^  in- 
stalled over  a  vast  continent.''  We  were  free,  as  few 
peoples  were,  from  such  fearful  dangers  as  poverty, 
famine,  and  invasion.  Men  could  live  free  from  fear. 
Careers  were  here  for  all  who  could  make  them.  The 
elements  of  material  good  fortune  were  becoming  ours 
beyond  any  measure  known  in  history.  And  so  the 
rival  ideal  of  success,  first  in  the  outward  and  then 
in  the  sordid  way,  has  been  growing  with  our  growth. 


THE  FACULTY  27 

feeding  itself  all  the  while  on  the  old  eternal  human 
selfishness.  It  has,  of  course,  been  true  at  all  times, 
and  notably  so  in  times  of  trial  like  the  Eevolution 
and  Civil  War,  that  the  nobler  side  has  asserted  itself 
and  that  men  in  their  thinking  and  doing  "  endured 
as  seeing  Him  who  is  invisible."  But  the  times  of 
ease,  plenty,  and  self-indulgence  have  not  been 
friendly  to  the  old  college  ideal,  any  more  than  they 
are  friendly  to  the  homely  virtues  of  simplicity,  clear 
sincerity,  scrupulous  respect  for  the  rights  of  others, 
and  modest  independence. 

Moreover,  as  is  almost  too  obvious  to  need  men- 
tion, and  yet  so  clamorously  important  as  to  need 
sure  remembrance,  our  whole  life,  including  its  edu- 
cational preparation,  has  been  getting  more  and  more 
complex  and  tense.  The  individual  counts  for  less 
and  less.  The  aggregate,  whether  organized  in  cor- 
porate form  or  disorganized  in  wild,  mob-like  drifts 
of  opinion  and  action,  counts  for  more.  To  keep  pace 
with  our  progress,  to  master  the  material  of  our  lives 
so  that  the  individual  shall  not  be  overwhelmed  and 
crushed,  some  sort  of  organization  becomes  more  and 
more  imperative,  if  only  that  each  man  may  have  a 
fair  chance  to  get  his  own  good  by  cooperating  and 
sharing  in  the  common  good.  And  out  of  this  state 
of  things  has  come  an  impatient  message  to  our  larger 
universities  first,  and  then  to  the  lesser  ones.     It  is 


28  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

that  efficiency  must  be  our  watchword  (and  catch- 
word), that  education  is  a  business,  and  that  univer- 
sities are  corporations  like  banks,  railroads,  factories, 
department  stores,  and  insurance  companies,  l^otice 
is  being  served  that  if  our  university  faculties  do  not 
conform  to  this  notion,  they  must  give  way  to  facul- 
ties that  will.  This  is  the  message.  What  have  we 
to  say  about  it  1 

II 

Let  us  make  some  admissions.  First  of  all,  there 
has  been  a  great  deal  of  folly  talked  about  the  free- 
dom of  faculties  and  of  individual  professors.  Would 
that  the  fact  a  man  is  a  professor  were  sufficient  proof 
that  he  is  also  a  man  of  sense !  Sometimes  it  is  not 
even  proof  that  he  is  a  scholar.  Before  we  talk  of 
larger  freedom,  we  must  be  sure  in  a  given  case  that 
the  individual  professor,  and  in  each  faculty  at  least 
the  strong  majority,  is  fit  to  be  free — that  is,  sure  to 
serve  well  the  one  supreme  end  for  which  professors 
and  faculties  legitimately  exist.  That  end  is  intel- 
lectual and  moral  freedom,  not  for  the  professors 
alone,  but  for  all  others  with  whom  they  come  in  con- 
tact. It  is  a  case  where  reciprocity  is  the  only  pro- 
tection. 

And  so  the  actual  assumption  of  responsibility  for 
using  this  freedom  well  must  come  in  to  prove  a  man 


THE  FACULTY  29 

fit  to  "be  free — to  temper  the  judgment,  to  make  us 
wise  in  counsel,  considerate  in  action,  tactful  in 
winning  men,  swift  to  help  and  slow  to  harm  the  uni- 
versity we  represent.  If  no  professor  proposed  a  reso- 
lution in  faculty,  I  will  not  say  unless  it  were  sensi- 
ble, but  unless  he  were  man  enough  to  see  it  through 
in  execution,  taking  the  blame  for  failure,  and  letting 
whoever  would  do  so  lay  claim  to  the  glory  in  case  of 
success,  we  should  then  see  a  faculty  undeniably  fit 
for  the  widest  freedom — an  irresistible  engine  for  the 
best  work.  So,  too,  if  no  professor  coveted  notoriety 
or  lowered  the  academic  tone  of  his  lectures  to  attract 
attendance  and  applause,  whether  by  exploiting  some 
novelty  or  serving  up  the  things  of  superficial  charm 
to  please  idle  hearers,  how  much  more  boldly  could 
we  demand  more  freedom  for  each  as  well  as  for  all. 
Plain  common-sense,  open-eyed  sympathy,  tolerance, 
modesty,  balance — these  are  some  of  the  old,  undra- 
matic  virtues  needed  as  guarantees  that  the  free  pro- 
fessor or  the  free  faculty  will  be  beneficently  free. 
And  yet  let  us  not  admit  too  much  in  this  connection, 
for  the  fact  that  American  faculties  are  not  stronger 
in  these  virtues,  and  consequently  deserving  of  more 
freedom,  is  not  first  of  all  the  fault  of  our  faculties, 
but  of  the  presidents  and  trustees  who  choose  them, 
or  else  the  fault  of  insufficient  resources. 

Secondly,  we  must  admit  that  universities  are  cor- 


30  AMERICAN   LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

porations  and  that  education  is  a  business.  Let  us 
do  so  heartily.  Is  it  not  time  we  got  away  from  hand- 
to-mouth  living  and  rule-of-thumb  reckoning,  and 
recognized  that  business  has  its  laws,  and  that  experts 
must  conduct  it?  Under  American  conditions  the 
management  of  a  large  university  requires  some 
stable  corporate  base  in  the  form  of  trustees  or  re- 
gents, and  one  executive  head,  a  president.  Unless 
we  are  to  go  wavering  and  drifting,  the  primacy  of 
president  and  trustees  must  be  maintained.  We  can- 
not  in  this  imitate  any  old-world  system. 

It  is  an  immense  gain  that  most  of  our  universities 
are  now  so  well  managed  on  the  business  side.  The 
wisdom  of  their  investments  has  made  more  than  one 
university  treasurer's  report  a  guide  to  prudent  in- 
vestors outside.  The  very  complexities  and  annoy- 
ances in  the  terms  of  gifts  and  endowments,  the 
variety  of  accounts  and  securities,  and  the  calcu- 
lation of  probable  revenues  on  less  certain  bases 
than  many  business  enterprises  possess  have  evoked 
surprising  vdsdom.  The  net  result  has  been  that  our 
leading  universities,  so  far  as  their  hampering  condi- 
tions permit,  usually  make  every  dollar  do  its  work. 
Would  any  man  in  his  senses  suppose  that  American 
faculties  could  or  would  do  as  well  ? 

Then  the  same  corporation  must  use  business  sense 
in  creating  and  maintaining  a  faculty.    The  best  pro- 


THE  FACULTY  31 

fessors  procurable  for  the  terms  that  can  he  offered, 
selection  and  promotion  on  recommendation  of  the 
president,  and  the  unifying  of  educational  policy  by 
means  of  the  same  sole  executive  head,  are  necessities 
of  our  situation.  In  all  this  our  universities  have 
been  learning  the  lessons  of  modern  business  effi- 
ciency. 

Ill 

Nevertheless,  if  this  is  the  sum  of  the  proposition 
that  university  education  is  a  business,  our  faculties 
are  in  a  bad  way,  because  it  means  the  destruction 
of  their  intellectual  and  moral  freedom  by  reason  of 
the  substitution  of  commercial  for  academic  stand- 
ards. That  this  is  the  chief  menace  at  the  present 
time  to  the  self-respect  and  usefulness  of  our  profes- 
sors and  faculties  must  be  evident  to  all  who  know 
them.  It  is,  of  course,  quite  possible  that  we  are  in 
a  transitional  period,  and  that  our  faculties  are  mov- 
ing; with  an  inevitable  trend  of  events.  That,  how- 
ever,  remains  to  be  seen.  But  if  it  is  so,  we  may  be 
sure  of  one  other  thing,  and  that  is  a  progressive  im- 
pairing of  academic  standards  and  an  ensuing  degra- 
dation of  our  faculties  to  the  condition  of  mere  em- 
ployees. So  far  as  this  happens,  universities  cease 
living  and  begin  dying.  To  avert  such  a  result,  or 
even  the  slightest  menace  of  it,  must  we  not  then  fight 


32  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

again  tlie  old  fight  for  our  academic  birthright,  and 
take  part  anew  in  the  /xdx^  aOdvaro^  for  a  reasonable 
freedom,  intellectual  and  moral,  personal  and  col- 
lective. Can  university  professors  who  are  men  give 
any  but  one  answer  to  such  a  question  ? 

The  trouble  with  the  theorem  ^'  education  is  a  busi- 
ness "  is  that  it  is  only  a  preliminary  half-truth — the 
half-truth  which,  however,  fills  the  eye  and  mind  of 
our  business  men.  The  truth  in  it  is  that  business 
method  is  the  means,  but  not  the  end,  of  education. 
The  other  and  better  half  is  that  "  the  business  of  a 
university  is  education  " — the  half  which  makes  the 
first  half  valuable.  And  while  the  trouble  in  profes- 
sors is  that  they  are  too  often  pitiably  ignorant  of 
the  wholesome  laws  of  business,  the  mate  to  this  fact 
is  that  the  business  world  is  almost  wholly  ignorant 
of  the  laws  of  education.  "  Your  plant  is  idle  in  the 
summer,"  said  a  British  manufacturer  to  an  Oxford 
professor.  "  You  ought  to  put  on  a  shift  of  men  for 
that  job."  "  The  trouble  with  your  plant,"  said  one 
of  our  captains  of  industry  lately,  "  is  that  your  out- 
put will  not  stand  business  tests.  Every  boy  you 
graduate  ought  to  be  your  standard  finished  product. 
Otherwise,  you  should  discard  him  early  in  the  course 
as  waste."  "  Suppose  it  happens  to  be  your  boy  ?  " 
he  was  asked.  "  And  suppose  this  sample  of  waste 
turns  out  later  to  be  a  valuable  by-product,  or  even 


THE  FACULTY  33 

the  real  thing  ?  What  then  ?  "  His  answer  was  a 
prompt  and  creditable  "  I  don't  know/'  The  region 
of  his  ignorance  included  the  domain  of  college  edu- 
cation. If,  then,  it  be  true  that  the  very  training 
which  makes  a  man  a  professor  dims  his  business  fac- 
ulties, is  it  not  fully  as  true  that  the  training  which 
absorbs  the  life  of  a  business  man  blinds  his  edu- 
cational perceptions?  How  else,  then,  can  this 
conscious  or  unconscious  antagonism  be  mediated, 
except  by  recognizing  that  each  has  a  lawful  hemi- 
sphere ?  The  hemisphere  of  business  is  secure  enough 
from  invasion,  but  for  the  hemisphere  of  education 
we  badly  need  a  new  Monroe  Doctrine. 

Let  us  stick  to  our  text,  that  the  one  business  of  a 
university  is  education.  It  will  then  be  clear  that  the 
character  and  extent  of  business  methods  allow^able  in 
conducting  a  university  must  be  governed  by  the  kind 
of  business  to  be  conducted.  It  will  also  be  clear  that 
while  the  trustees  or  regents  must  strive  to  hold  the 
university  faithful  to  its  trust  and  to  secure  what  will 
make  it  efficient  in  its  every  part,  the  faculty  alone  is 
the  body  capable,  or  to  be  made  capable,  of  the  con- 
duct of  all  educational  business  according  to  educa- 
tional standards.  The  first  dangerous  invasion  of 
commercialism  is  naturally  made  upon  the  corpora- 
tion, the  body  which  connects  the  university  with  the 
outside  practical  world,  the  body  which  is,  therefore. 


34  AMERICAN   LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

most  accessible  to  attack.  One  and  another  trustee 
in  the  laudable  desire  for  efficiency  is  apt  to  think  first 
of  the  efficiency  with  which  he  is  most  familiar,  the 
efficiency  of  the  bank,  the  railroad,  the  business 
house.  Under  this  impulse  he  unconsciously  veers 
away  from  the  academic  point  of  view.  Soon  others 
turn  away;  enough  to  make  a  working  majority,  and, 
naturally,  the  first  point  of  common  convergence  is  in 
centralizing  the  deliberative,  as  well  as  active,  fimc- 
tions  of  the  university,  including  much  of  the  proper 
business  of  the  faculty,  and  even  of  the  trustees  or 
regents,  in  the  person  of  one  head  officer — the  presi- 
dent. 

I  believe  most  firmly  in  high  powers  and,  in  grave 
emergencies,  irresistible  powers  for  every  university 
president,  in  quick  control  of  everything  at  short 
range.  But  that  is  one  thing,  a  safe  and  wise  thing, 
provided  always  it  is  done  in  the  environment  of  open 
inspection,  quick  accountability,  close  participation 
of  all  competent  members  of  boards  and  faculties,  and 
the  most  scrupulous  jealousy  in  maintaining  for  every 
one  the  utmost  freedom  of  initiative,  both  in  speech 
and  action,  that  can  be  used  with  lovaltv.  Otherwise, 
so  far  as  sharing  in  the  common  business  goes,  and  so 
far  as  personal  usefulness  is  concerned,  we  make 
boards  and  faculties  personally  and  collectively  less 
efficient  for  the  very  end  they  are  created  to  promote, 


THE  FACULTY  35 

and  not  the  advantages,  but  the  abuses,  of  the  busi- 
ness "world  are  ominously  repeated  in  the  form  of 
"  dummy  ''  trustees  and  "  dummy  ''  professors. 


IV 

The  profound  change,  then,  now  in  progress  in  our 
American  faculties  is  in  the  relation  of  the  faculty 
to  the  president.  The  tendency,  borrowed  from  the 
business  world  and  increasing  with  the  number  of 
persons  in  the  faculty,  is  toward  individual  and  col- 
lective dependence  on  the  president.  And  yet,  so  far 
as  this  does  not  curtail  the  self-respect  of  honorable 
professors  by  abridging  their  freedom  to  teach  what 
they  really  believe,  or  to  take  part  fully  in  the  busi- 
ness of  the  faculty  without  prejudice  to  their  standing 
or  livelihood,  even  if  they  do  not  happen  to  agree  in 
one  or  another  important  matter  with  the  president, 
then,  whatever  is  to  be  said  against  this  increasing 
dependence  as  a  danger  to  efl&ciency,  it  cannot  be  criti- 
cised as  an  attack  on  personal  freedom.  And  it  is 
here  we  thinlc  the  test  should  be  found  as  to  what  con- 
stitutes a  professor's  reasonable  freedom.  For,  after 
all,  the  university  must  pull  together,  or  it  will  pull 
apart.  And,  though  the  head  be  not  the  whole  body 
or  the  major  part  of  the  body,  the  academic  body,  like 
the  human,  must  have  a  head,  unless  it  is  to  be  a  life- 


36  AMERICAN   LIBERAL   EDUCATION 

less  trunk,  and  only  one  head,  unless  it  is  to  be  a  mon- 
strosity. 

Is  there  anything,  then,  that  needs  to  he  suggested 
in  order  that  the  faculty,  keeping  to  its  own  function 
and  showing  loyal  deference  to  its  head,  may  be  kept 
from  deterioration  as  the  sole  organ  whose  function 
it  is  actually  to  conduct  university  education  effi- 
ciently ?  Let  us  examine  some  of  the  suggestions  that 
have  been  made : 

1.  That  the  president,  as  the  responsible  head, 
should  initiate  all  important  measures  of  educational 
policy.  This  means  that  he  initiates  such  measures, 
either  alone,  or  by  putting  them  in  operation  by  the 
action  of  the  corporation,  and  thus  imposing  them  on 
the  faculty,  or  by  introducing  them  in  faculty  after 
shaping  them  in  conference  with  a  committee  of  the 
faculty,  or  by  proposing  them  first  in  open  faculty. 
There  is  something  to  be  said  for  even  this  extreme 
view.  It  is  that  the  university  has  one  clear  policy, 
and  that  the  president  has  untrammelled  opportunity, 
with  practically  exclusive  responsibility,  for  doing 
whatever  he  thinks  should  be  done.  Let  us  take  a  dar- 
ing step  and  go  so  far  as  to  say  that  there  may  be 
momentous  occasions  when  the  president  must  "  go 
it  alone  "  or  face  an  absolute  impasse.  Let  us  trust 
such  occasions  may  not  occur,  nor  even  occasions 
when  the  corporation  and  president  may  come  to  feel 


THE  FACULTY  37 

the  J  must  join  to  impose  unwelcome  laws  on  reluctant 
faculties.  Such  situations  merely  argue  a  university 
to  be  in  a  very  bad  way. 

Introducing  measures  of  policy  after  shaping  them 
in  a  committee  or  department  does  of  course  recog- 
nize that  there  is  value  in  expert  counsel,  and*  intro- 
duction in  open  faculty  recognizes  and  welcomes  the 
help  and  advice  of  all.  These  are  natural  methods 
for  any  president  who  wishes  his  policies  to  be  under- 
stood by  his  colleagues,  and  the  latter  method  is  the 
one  w^hich  insures  the  most  cordial  assent  and,  in  the 
long  run,  the  greatest  efficiency,  though  it  must  be 
confessed  the  penalty  is  sometimes  the  long-suffering 
endurance  of  professors  w^ho  "  darken  counsel  by 
words  without  knowledge.'^  When  the  first  reference 
of  a  measure  is  made  from  the  faculty  to  its  commit- 
tee for  digestion  and  formulation,  rather  than  by  first 
reference  of  measures  in  predigested  form  from  the 
president  and  a  committee  to  the  faculty,  both  the 
sense  of  freedom  and  of  responsibility  are  quickened 
in  the  minds  of  the  faculty  as  in  no  other  way.  Yet, 
whichever  of  these  various  modes  the  president  may 
use,  the  general  thesis  that  the  president  should  ini- 
tiate all  important  measures  of  policy  has  more 
against  it  than  for  it.  Every  measure  thus  proposed 
becomes  an  administration  measure  and  seems  to 
challenge  at  the  outset  the  loyalty  and  security  of 


38  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

every  one  who  may  not  be  able  to  agree  with  it.  In 
such  circumstances,  the  free  utterance  of  real  opinion, 
imless  it  happens  to  be  in  substantial  accord  with  the 
measure  proposed,  becomes  almost  impossible.  Self- 
criticism  is  one  of  the  necessary  educational  functions 
of  a  university,  in  order  that  all  its  measures  may 
have  the  preliminary  test  as  to  whether  or  no  they  are 
well  considered  on  all  sides  and  will  work  well  when 
put  in  operation.  Whenever,  for  any  reason,  the  at- 
mosphere of  a  faculty  room  is  not  friendly  to  this  free 
utterance,  the  results  are  sure  to  be  disheartening. 
Some  professors  will  develop  a  cynical  disregard  of 
their  duty  to  speak  what  they  think,  the  weaker  ones 
will  be  constrained  to  evasion,  or  even  official  hypoc- 
risy, and  all  will  exhibit  in  varying  degrees  a  loss  of 
interest  in  the  welfare  of  the  university,  except  in  so 
far  as  their  own  personal  fortunes  are  affected.  This 
turns  professors  into  place-holders  and  place-hunters. 
The  logical  end  is  the  destruction  of  responsibility, 
and  consequently  of  interest,  on  the  part  of  the  fac- 
ulty in  the  important  measures  of  policy  on  which  the 
higher  welfare  of  the  university  depends.  Need  it  be 
added,  by  way  of  warning  to  those  who  believe  in 
subjecting  universities  to  the  standards  of  the  busi- 
ness world,  that  a  faculty  thus  circumstanced  is 
bound  to  become  increasingly  inefficient,  and  also  un- 
attractive to  the  best  professors  ? 


THE  FACULTY  39 

2.  There  is  the  suggestion  of  dual  control  by  the 
president  and  faculty.  This  seems  to  me  worse  than 
the  former;  for,  if  the  one  seems  to  spell  autocracy, 
the  other  spells  weakness  and  discord.  In  case  the 
president  is  a  strong  man,  it  means  ceaseless  friction 
between  him  and  an  oligarchy  of  professors.  If  he 
is  a  weak  man,  it  means  the  presidency  is  reduced  to 
a  chairmanship  by  courtesy.  In  either  event,  it 
means  structural  weakness  in  the  university  and  an 
unsteady  attitude  which  keeps  producing  trouble  in- 
side and  distrust  outside. 

3.  Some  may,  perhaps,  favor  the  idea  of  faculty 
ascendancy.  For  us,  Oxford  and  Cambridge  are  its 
best  examples.  The  professors  there  are  virtually 
their  own  trustees,  and  they  choose  their  ovm  vice- 
chancellor.  The  plan  has  one  very  great  advantage — 
personal  freedom  in  a  higher  degree  than  is  known 
in  our  faculties,  or  even  in  Germany.  But  let  any 
one  who  would  introduce  it  here  remember  the  abys- 
mal differences  that  yawn  between  that  situation  and 
ours.  Oxford  and  Cambridge  are  indeed  more  demo- 
cratic in  the  matter  of  professorial  freedom  than  we 
are.  But  it  is  a  democratic  freedom  that  rests  upon 
an  aristocratic  presupposition,  a  freedom  of  the  pro- 
fessorial caste  resting  on  a  tradition  sanctioned  by 
centuries  of  privilege,  checked  and  counter-checked  by 
the  balancing  of  intercollegiate  rivalry,  and  issuing 


40  AMERICAN   LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

in  restriction  of  all  initiative  to  a  small  council, 
elected,  to  be  sure,  but  so  constituted  as  to  be  change- 
able only  very  slov^ly.  Admirably  in  accord  as  it  is 
with  the  stable  and  soberly  balanced  love  of  liberty, 
"  broadening  slowly  dov^n  from  precedent  to  prece- 
dent," that  has  made  England  great,  it  is  not  a  fac- 
ulty model  that  can  be  produced  here.  But  may  it 
never  perish  there ! 

4.  There  remains  to  be  considered  what  can  be 
done  under  our  own  conditions  to  invigorate  and  per- 
fect the  faculty,  not  only  to  save  it  from  the  subtle 
poison  of  commercialism,  but  to  make  it  do  its  educa- 
tional business  efficiently,  with  full  self-respect  and 
in  sure  harmony  with  the  president  and  corporation. 
I  believe  the  one  thing  to  be  done  is  to  revive  in  full 
power  the  democracy  of  the  faculty,  with  its  free 
president  honored  supremely  and  followed  steadily  as 
the  one  natural,  as  well  as  official  leader  of  free  pro- 
fessors. Only  by  following  this  path  shall  we  be 
enabled  to  avoid  the  rank  commercialism  which  be- 
lieves in  its  heart  that  a  university  is  something  like 
a  store  where  the  trustees  are  the  proprietors,  the 
president  the  manager,  the  professors  the  employees, 
and  the  students  the  capricious  customers. 

And  here  we  have  to  stop  a  moment  to  notice  a 
futile  remedy  that  appears  in  many  forms.  It  is  the 
remedy  of  committees  and  departments  and  councils 


THE  FACULTY  41 

and  senates.  We  are  organized  to  death.  It  is  the 
*^  worship  of  machinery  "  all  over  again.  Of  course, 
these  things  have  constant  and  even  indispensable 
uses.  Of  course,  we  must  know  where  things  are,  or 
we  shall  never  find  them.  For  the  routine  business, 
the  ever-recurring  humdrum  task,  the  mechanics  and 
economics  of  our  work,  we  shall  always  be  needing 
these  things — ^but  always  as  our  servants,  never  as  our 
masters.  If,  behind  the  complex  of  our  committees, 
we  do  not  have  the  watchful  criticism  and  active  co- 
operation of  the  whole  faculty — if  the  faculty  does 
not  really  understand  what  its  agents  are  doing,  or 
what  their  measures  mean — then  the  committees  are 
virtually  the  faculty,  and  the  faculty  becomes  little 
more  than  a  listless  and  dwindling  audience.  This 
may  possibly  do  well  enough  for  routine  business,  but 
never  for  the  understanding  or  cooperative  execution 
of  a  great  policy.  For,  unless  a  faculty  actually  con- 
trols all  its  parts  and  agencies,  it  cannot  do  its  busi- 
ness in  the  best  way,  nor  can  it  long  maintain  its  just 
freedom. 

Let  us  face  the  situation.  American  faculties  are 
weaker  than  they  ought  to  be,  so  far  as  concerns  their 
power  to  maintain  educational  standards  and  to  per- 
form their  own  educational  business.  Their  great 
growth  has  called  for  better  organization,  but  organi- 
zation has  progressed  too  much  without  regard  to  the 


42  AMERICAN   LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

fact  that  the  object  is  not  organization,  but  educa- 
tion. The  gi'eater  centralization  of  functions  in  the 
president,  with  all  its  advantages,  has  been  at  the  ex- 
pense of  the  free  and  proper  exercise  of  the  functions 
both  of  faculties  and  corporations.  But  this  is  not 
all.  The  decline  of  the  old  college  ideal,  which  in- 
volved as  one  of  its  corollaries  a  definite  liberal  edu- 
cation by  means  of  a  few  common  studies  of  central 
importance,  has  been  profoundly  influencing  the  char- 
acter of  our  supply  of  professors.  Less  and  less  em- 
phasis has  been  placed  on  the  general  make-up  of  the 
man,  and  more  and  more  on  his  specialized  knowl- 
edge. The  destructive  theory  that  a  professor  is 
solely  a  teacher  or  investigator,  and  no  longer  a  Avhole 
man,  has  shorn  him  of  a  priceless  part  of  his  aca- 
demic citizenship.  This  view  has  been  followed  by 
its  sequel,  that  the  professor  is  concerned  only  with 
his  specialty.  And  so  not  only  have  we  been  acqui- 
escing in  the  view  that  his  intensive  special  knowledge 
of  one  subject,  or  part  of  a  subject,  is  properly  ac- 
companied by  an  extensive  general  ignorance  of  other 
subjects,  but  we  have  been  cheerfully  accepting  pro- 
fessors who  are  almost  totally  blind  in  regard  to  the 
affairs  of  university  education.  Professors  have  been 
going  by  such  differing  paths  of  preliminary  training 
into  their  several  by-paths  of  special  study  that  they 
are  not  only  getting  far  apart  intellectually,  but  find 


THE  FACULTY  43 

they  have  no  one  common  ground  to  which  they  may 
ever  return  and  meet  in  full  fellowship.  It  is  the 
very  satire  of  our  history  that,  along  with  centraliza- 
tion of  the  presidential  functions  and  the  constitution 
of  elaborate  machinery  to  keep  things  working  to- 
gether, there  has  been  a  corresponding  dispersion, 
from  another  cause,  of  the  men  who  most  need  to 
stand  constantly  together  in  counselling  for  the  best 
good  of  their  universities.  This  must  be  changed,  if 
our  faculties  are  to  consist  more  and  more  of  men  of 
all-round  ability,  men  who  are  able  to  see  and  fit  to 
solve  larger  questions  with  the  moderation  of  wisdom. 
This  means  a  renewal  and  better  realization  of  the  old 
college  ideal  which  aimed  to  turn  boys,  not  first  of  all 
into  merchants  or  bankers  or  lawyers  or  professors  as 
such,  but  into  well-balanced,  self-directing  strong 
men.  If  this  standard  shall  be  restored  to  its  pri- 
macy, we  shall  see  in  operation  a  force  indispensable 
for  the  production  of  professors  who  are  fit  to  be  free. 
Meanwhile,  recognizing  the  full  rights  of  all  parties 
involved,  and  recognizing  further  the  need  of  begin- 
ning without  delay,  the  all-important  thing  just  now 
is  to  revive  in  vigor  the  democracy  of  the  faculty. 
This  means  that  it  is  the  duty  of  every  member  to 
take  part  and  make  his  voice  heard  in  the  business  of 
the  faculty,  without  arrogance  and  without  fear,  until 
such  time  as  it  becomes  clear  to  his  colleagues  that  he 


44  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

is  not  fit.  Then  lie  should  subside.  How  shall  we 
ever  be  educated  as  faculty  members,  unless  this  at- 
tempt is  made  ?  There  will  be  some  time  wasted. 
Unwise  suggestions  will  find  utterance.  They  will 
meet  with  their  natural  corrective  in  the  criticism  of 
others.  It  will  be  well  worth  while.  One  priceless 
result  will  be  that  whatever  the  faculty  does  will  be 
its  own  free  act.  With  this  will  come  the  sobering 
influence  of  responsibility,  to  make  all  men  who  are 
not  without  sense  use  their  liberty  sensibly.  Other 
good  things  will  follow.  A  living  tradition  in  things 
intellectual  and  moral  will  be  established,  a  self- 
renewing  tradition  that  will  enable  the  university  to 
exhibit  to  the  world  with  some  show  of  definiteness 
and  continuity  the  ideals  for  which  it  stands.  These 
are  the  only  traditions  that  have  a  chance  to  outlast 
the  men  who  make  them. 

To  this  end,  committees  and  executive  officers,  such 
as  deans,  heads  of  departments,  and  chairmen,  should 
really  be  the  choice  of  the  faculty,  even  though  the 
president  names  them.  All  committees  and  all  offi- 
cers used  by  the  faculty  in  its  service  should  be  ac- 
countable to  the  faculty,  and  their  reports  and  pro- 
posals should  be  freely  debated. 

But  what,  it  may  be  asked,  is  to  happen  in  case  a 
faculty  and  its  president  do  not  agree  ?  A  presiden- 
tial veto  is  no  remedy  here.     So  far  as  I  can  learn,  it 


THE  FACULTY  45 

has  never  been  used  with  satisfaction  to  any  one  con- 
cerned. What  then  ?  I  see  only  one  way.  If,  after 
debate,  a  faculty  persists  in  its  action,  the  right  of  the 
president,  on  recording  his  dissent,  to  take  the  whole 
matter  for  review  to  the  corporation  should  be  a  mat- 
ter of  course,  and  unless  the  faculty  is  overwhelm- 
ingly against  the  president,  a  wise  corporation  will 
usually  sustain  him.  But  nothing  will  have  been 
smothered.  The  voice  of  the  faculty  will  have  been 
heard,  and  responsibility  will  be  placed  on  the  presi- 
dent and  corporation,  where  it  belongs.  Contrari- 
wise, if  the  president  accedes  to  some  faculty  action 
he  does  not  approve,  but  does  not  think  needs  to  be 
taken  to  the  corporation,  then  again  the  responsibility 
is  placed  where  it  belongs.  If  it  turns  out  that  the 
action  of  the  faculty  was  wise,  the  responsibility  is 
rightly  placed  on  the  faculty,  and  the  president  wins 
approval  for  his  considerateness.  If  it  turns  out  that 
the  action  of  the  faculty  was  unwise,  then  again  the 
responsibility  is  rightly  placed  on  the  faculty,  and  the 
president's  opinion  gains  new  weight.  We  do  not 
need  more  machinery.  We  need  this  common  under- 
standing. It  will  make  steadily  for  justice,  peace, 
freedom,  and  efficiency. 

No  university  ever  acquires  true  grandeur  unless 
its  faculty  is  made  up  of  free  men.  iSTo  faculty  dis- 
charges its  duty  happily  and  amply  unless  it  is  en- 


46  AMERICAN   LIBERAL   EDUCATION 

tirelj  free  to  propose  and  debate  what  it  thinks  right, 
and  finally,  no  self-respecting  faculty  will  do  other 
than  help  its  president,  whether  it  happens  to  agree 
with  him  or  not,  so  long  as  he  devotes  himself  faith- 
fully to  his  arduous  task.  That  task  is  to  promote 
among  his  colleagues,  his  students,  and  all  whom  his 
university  can  influence,  the  intellectual  and  moral 
freedom  of  men.  And  so  I  return  to  the  opening 
thought :  The  old  college  ideal  is  the  true  one.  We 
need  it  more  than  ever  to  save  our  universities — presi- 
dents, trustees,  professors,  students,  and  alumni,  and 
all  whom  they  can  influence — from  the  degrading  per- 
sonal and  official  servility  that  comes  from  commer- 
cializing our  higher  education. 


Ill 


TKUE  A'NB   FALSE   STANDAEDS   OF 
GEADUATE    WOEK^ 

We  need  not  stop  to  prove  at  the  outset  of  this  dis- 
cussion that  the  liberal  arts  and  sciences  are  and  must 
be  the  central  and  regulative  part  of  every  true  uni- 
versity. This  body  of  studies  alone,  taken  in  its  en- 
tirety, presents  us  with  the  nearest  approach  to  a 
system  of  pure  knowledge  of  universal  value,  ever 
improving,  self-renewing,  growing  slowly  clearer, 
more  complete  from  age  to  age.  It  represents  to  us, 
as  no  other  body  of  studies  can,  the  sum  of  things 
best  worth  knowing  by  men  whose  object  is  to  follow 
truth  for  its  own  sake,  not  as  a  means  for  obtaining  a 
living,  nor  for  social  and  political  gain,  but  for  the 
sake  of  ordering  their  lives  in  accordance  with  the 
highest  ends.  It  was  not  without  some  glimpse  of 
this  truth  that  mediaeval  letters  referred  to  the  uni- 
versities of  Paris  and  Oxford  as  "  the  two  eyes  of 
Christendom,"  nor  was  it  without  like  insight  some 

^  Read  in  Chicago,  Friday,  March  31, 1905,  at  the  Tenth  Annual 
Meetinsi;  of  the  North  Central  Association  of  Colleges  aad  Second- 
ary Schools. 

47 


48  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

of  the  oldest  university  documents  began  with  the 
phrase :  ^^  We  seek  the  pearl  of  knowledge,  of  great 
price,  in  the  field  of  liberal  studies.'^    And  what  was 
thus  true  of  universities  at  their  birth  has  been  true 
in  every  generation  down  to  our  own  time  and  is  evi- 
denced in  many  ways — as,  for  instance,  in  the  fine 
declaration  of  Hofmann  in  his  address  as  Rector  of 
the  University  of  Berlin,  wherein  he  figured  the  lib- 
eral knowledge  enshrined  in  the  Philosophical  Fac- 
ultv  as  "  the  Palladium  of  the  Ideal/'    And  so  it  is. 
Watch  the  wavering  fortunes  of  university  history. 
'No  deterioration  in  the  purity  and  strength  of  intel- 
lectual standards  has  taken  place  without  affecting 
injuriously  these  studies.     No  great  wave  of  com- 
mercial, technical  or  other  utilitarian  influence  has 
swept  on  unchecked  into  university  life  without  dis- 
aster to  university  ideals.     And  no  great  period  of 
intellectual  illumination  and  advance  has  come  to  any 
university  in  all  the  time  of  recorded  history  except 
through  the  self-sacrificing  devotion  of  men  to  the 
cause  of  knowledge  as  embodied  in,  or,  at  least,  as 
closely  related  to  the  distinctively  liberal  arts  and 
sciences.     This  has  been  our  guiding  light  always. 

A  university  may  have,  and  a  complete  univer- 
sity must  have  more  than  this  central  faculty  of  arts 
and  sciences.  The  professional  and  technical  schools 
which  properly  round  out  the  circle,  so  far  from  be- 


STANDARDS  OF  GRADUATE  WORK     49 

ing  despised  as  parts  of  a  university,  are  tlie  great 
appliances  which  connect  the  ideal  centre  of  knowl- 
edge with  the  practical  needs  of  the  world.  A  law 
school,  a  medical  school,  an  engineering  school,  all 
derive  immense  benefit  by  being  placed  in  proper  re- 
lation to  the  central  faculty  of  arts  and  sciences,  and 
give  back  many  benefits  in  turn.  But  no  aggregation 
of  professional  and  technical  schools  makes  a  real 
university,  because  such  an  aggregation  lacks  its  vital 
centre,  its  faculty  of  arts  and  sciences,  which  alone 
can  maintain  the  universal  standards  of  knowledge 
in  all  their  exactness  and  rigor,  and  thus  relate  and 
steady  the  particular  standards  of  the  several  profes- 
sional and  technical  schools. 

The  liberal  arts  and  sciences  fall  into  two  sections. 
The  first  or  lower  section  is  the  undergraduate  college 
course  of  study,  the  one  thing  in  our  higher  education 
which  is  best  worth  preserving,  for  this  alone  fur- 
nishes the  best  basis,  which  is  always  desired,  though 
not  as  yet  generally  taken,  for  subsequent  university 
study,  whether  of  liberal  or  professional  character. 
So  I  need  not  do  more  here  than  state  the  fact  that 
to  preserve  and  develop  the  undergi'aduate  college 
education  in  its  purest  form  is  to  do  an  indispensable 
service  to  all  forms  of  graduate  study. 

Let  us  turn  at  once  to  the  graduate  work  and  con- 
fine our  attention  to  this  other  section  of  the  field  of 


50  AMERICAN   LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

liberal  studies.  Professional  and  technical  studies 
may  in  a  sense  be  depended  on  to  take  care  of  them- 
selves. They  will  always  flourish  so  long  as  men  are 
seeking  to  be  educated  in  order  to  make  a  profitable 
living.  But  graduate  work  in  liberal  studies  cannot 
be  maintained  on  this  basis,  because  the  end  aimed  at 
is  different.  For  if  the  pursuit  of  wealth  or  station 
is  the  end  aimed  at  by  a  man  who  thinks  he  is  giving 
himself  to  the  life  of  a  scholar,  he  is  not  aiming  at  a 
scholarly  end.  Consequently,  in  order  to  maintain 
its  own  standards,  a  true  graduate  school  in  the  lib- 
eral arts  and  sciences  must  depend  on  something  else 
to  sustain  it.  The  moment  it  becomes  an  employ- 
ment bureau  or  an  agency  for  finding  places,  a  sordid 
motive  enters,  and  it  is  in  danger  of  ceasing  to  be 
a  school  devoted  to  the  cause  of  truth  and  knowledge. 
Unless,  therefore,  the  life  of  the  scholar  is  to  appeal 
to  men  not  primarily  as  a  means  of  livelihood,  but 
because  they  cannot  help  following  the  scholar's  life, 
we  have  no  sufficient  basis  for  justifying  the  main- 
tenance of  this  all-important  school.  And  if  this 
school  perishes  or  becomes  degraded,  you  may  be  very 
sure  that  sooner  or  later  every  valuable  function  of 
the  university  will  be  injured. 

I  suppose  we  can  all  accept  heartily  the  statement 
that  the  chief  business  of  a  university  is  to  maintain 
standards — to  determine,  inspect,  and  certify  the  in- 


STANDARDS  OF  GRADUATE  WORK     51 

tellectual  and  moral  weights  and  measures.  I  do  not 
doubt  we  can  go  farther  and  agree  in  asserting  that 
this  maintenance  of  intellectual  and  moral  standards 
is  acutely  needed  in  our  own  nation  at  this  time  when 
its  material  interests  are  becoming  so  vast  and  com- 
plex. And  this,  more  than  all  else,  is  the  peculiar 
and  pressing  duty  of  every  graduate  school  in  liberal 
studies.  Here  the  higher  teachers  of  the  nation  are 
being  trained.  Here  the  influences  which  make  for 
truth  and  reason  are  or  at  least  ought  to  be  most 
pure  and  uncontaminated.  The  service  to  be  ren- 
dered is  priceless,  the  need  is  urgent,  and  the  fact 
that  our  graduate  schools  in  liberal  studies,  properly 
planned  and  guided,  are  specially  fitted  to  render  this 
service  is  the  fact  which  justifies  their  existence. 

It  therefore  becomes  a  matter  of  the  first  moment 
for  us  that  the  standards  of  graduate  work  should  be 
maintained  in  as  much  purity  as  our  means  and  intel- 
ligence permit.  We  know  they  will  not  be  perfect  at 
the  best,  but  we  also  know  that  if  we  maintain  them 
at  a  lower  level  than  we  ought,  even  according  to  our 
own  imperfect  conceptions  of  duty,  there  is  nothing 
to  keep  even  our  existing  standards  from  deteriorat- 
ing. The  duty  of  self-criticism  is  therefore  ever  with 
us,  not  only  if  we  are  to  improve,  but  if  we  are  to 
keep  what  we  have.  I  therefore  ask  you  to  look  for 
a  little  while  at  three  aspects  of  this  question  of  true 


52  AMERICAN   LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

and  false  standards  in  graduate  work — namely,  our 
standards  of  knowledge,  our  standards  of  expression, 
and  our  standards  of  judgment. 

1.  The  standards  of  knowledge  in  graduate  work 
are  especially  threatened  just  now  by  the  antagonism 
of  an  unenlightened  specialization.  This  is  not  only 
the  curse  of  the  specialization  which  does  not  rest  on 
a  sound  general  education,  but  in  a  degree  of  all 
specialization  which  does  not  limit  the  subdivision  of 
studies  by  some  consideration  of  the  intrinsic  value 
of  the  thing  studied.  What  knowledge  is  of  most 
worth?  is  the  fundamental  question  which  tests 
every  graduate  study  and  every  graduate  student,  as 
it  does  every  one  who  professes  to  be  a  thinker  in  any 
field  of  knowledge  at  any  stage  of  his  life.  It  has 
now  become  a  very  fair  question  whether  the  subdi- 
vision of  topics  has  not  gone  so  far  that  not  only  the 
perception  of  relative  values  is  clouded,  but  even  the 
community  of  intellectual  interests  among  our  higher 
students  is  being  destroyed.  Certainly  many  of  our 
scholars  seem  to  be  subjects  of  one  or  another  petty 
principality  rather  than  freemen  in  the  great  com- 
monwealth of  knowledge. 

It  is  a  matter  of  common  remark  that  many  of 
our  rising  students  in  science  are  only  too  ignorant 
of  literature,  many  philosophers  ignorant  of  science, 
and  many  literary  men  ignorant  of  both.    But  this  is 


STANDARDS  OF  GRADUATE  WORK     53 

not  the  full  extent  of  the  trouble.  Many  men, 
whether  in  science  or  philosophy  or  literature  or  his- 
tory, are  unacquainted  with  and  utterly  uninterested 
in  either  science  or  philosophy  or  literature  or  history 
as  a  whole.  We  may  subdivide  still  more  and  find 
that  one  philosopher  is  a  logician  only,  one  scientific 
man  a  biologist  only,  and  some  other  scholar  a  classi- 
cal philologist  only.  Would  that  we  could  stop  here. 
But  we  must  go  on  until  we  discover  that  there  are 
many  who  are  familiar  only  with  some  subdivision  of 
a  division  of  their  logic  or  biology  or  philology. 
They  may  be  known  by  two  characteristics :  The  first 
is  their  intensive  knowledge  of  a  small  portion  of 
some  subject,  which  is  all  very  well,  and  the  second 
is  their  extensive  ignorance  of  everything  outside  that 
small  portion  of  their  subject,  which  is  not  well  at 
all.  How  vividly  it  brings  out  the  point  of  Mon- 
taigne^s  satirical  story.  As  he  rode  across  the  plain 
one  morning,  he  encountered  a  company  of  gentlemen 
and  said  to  them,  "  Good  morning,  Messieurs,"  and 
the  leader  of  the  company  sharply  replied,  ^'  We  are 
not  Messieurs.  My  friend  here  is  a  grammarian  and 
I  am  a  logician."  Were  these  worthy  scholars  living 
to-day,  perhaps  they  would  not  be  able  to  profess  even 
so  much.  The  one  would  likely  be  a  student  of  some 
little  part  of  syntax  and  the  other  the  exploiter  of  a 
mechanical  device  for  grinding  out  some  special  re- 


54  AMERICAN   LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

suits  of  the  use  of  the  syllogism.  This  again  may  be 
well  enough,  provided  the  specialist  is  not  making  it 
the  end  of  his  intellectual  life,  provided  he  constantly 
realizes  that  the  only  valuable  specialization  lies  in 
studying  the  general  in  the  particular,  and  that  the 
relating  of  an  accurately  determined  particular  to  the 
general  is  the  only  thing  which  gives  the  results  of 
specialized  study  their  place  and  shows  their  size  in 
the  body  of  valuable  knowledge.  We  are  not  object- 
ing to  specialization — far  from  it — but  solely  to  the 
study  of  the  unimportant.  And  this  may  take  many 
forms.  It  may  take  the  form  of  investigating  some- 
thing which,  when  ascertained,  is  found  to  be  a  trifle. 
Or  it  may  take  the  form  of  solemnly  proving  the  ob- 
vious by  an  elaborate  array  of  statistics,  as  when  we 
are  shown  conclusively  by  tables  of  percentages, 
which  have  been  tested  and  retested,  that  a  given 
number  of  childreir  born  and  bred  in  the  city,  com- 
pared with  the  same  number  born  and  bred  in  the 
country,  show  less  knowledge  of  the  different  kinds 
of  plants,  grains,  birds,  and  beasts  than  do  their  rural 
compeers.  Of  the  same  nature  is  the  recent  proof 
showing  minutely  and  beyond  the  shadow  of  a 
doubt  that  in  the  domain  of  "  child  psychology " 
there  was  a  marked  distinction  between  the  prefer- 
ences of  young  boys  and  girls  for  animal  pets,  more 
girls  than  boys  preferring  birds,  and  that  unkindness 


STANDARDS  OF  GRADUATE  WORK      55 

or  cruelty  to  an  animal  was  from  thirty  to  fifty  per 
cent  more  shocking  to  a  girl  than  to  a  boy.  Does 
one  need  to  pursue  higher  university  studies  in  order 
to  know  this  ? 

A  force  which  is  always  operating  to  increase  the 
perplexities  of  the  situation  is  the  mania  for  publi- 
cation. It  is  assumed  that  production  of  original 
results,  published  so  all  may  have  a  chance  to  read 
and  test  them,  is  a  necessary  mark  of  the  higher 
scholarship.  Pressure  is  therefore  constantly  felt  by 
the  aspiring  young  candidate  to  justify  himself  in  the 
eyes  of  other  scholars  in  this  way.  Our  embryo 
Doctors  of  Philosophy  must  w^rite  and  print  a  disser- 
tation. This  again  is  very  well,  if  the  man  who  is 
writing  the  dissertation  has  a  sensible  mind  and  is 
writing  about  something  that  needs  to  be  made 
known.  But  what  has  come  to  pass?  Another  del- 
uge !  The  number  of  reviews,  scattered  articles  and 
contributions  of  every  sort  in  any  one  great  subject, 
such  as  biology,  or  history,  or  chemistry,  or  classics, 
is  so  great  that  it  is  doubtful  whether  any  human 
being  can  read  in  ten  years  the  output  in  any  one  of 
these  subjects  for  one  year.  The  vast  mass  of  publi- 
cations is  piling  up  unsifted,  unorganized,  and  there- 
fore unavailable  to  a  large  extent  for  future  use.  It 
reminds  us  a  little  of  what  Carlyle  said  about  the 
voluminous  archives  of  the  Prench  Revolution :  "  The 


56  AIMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

French  Revolution  consists  of  some  tons  of  manu- 
script slowly  rotting  in  the  European  libraries." 

The  menace  to  our  standards  of  knowledge  offered 
by  intemperate  specialization  is  thus  increased  by  a 
false  notion  as  to  what  scholarly  productivity  is.  It 
consists  not  only  in  the  advancement  of  knowledge, 
but  in  the  diffusion  of  knowledge,  and,  above  all,  it 
consists  primarily  in  the  advancement  and  diffusion 
of  the  more  valuable  knowledge.  And,  in  passing,  let 
us  ask  how  any  one  can  fail  to  see  that  the  question 
whether  a  certain  body  of  knowledge  is  new  or  old 
has  in  itself  nothing  to  do  with  the  question  of  rela- 
tive values.  Furthermore,  in  the  forming  of  a  great 
scholar  by  the  close  personal  touch  of  his  master  there 
is  a  far  nobler  form  of  productivity  than  in  the  writ- 
ing of  even  an  important  dissertation.  As  a  rule, 
the  best  ^'  collected  works  "  a  scholar  can  leave  is  a 
group  of  great  students.  In  the  light  of  such  con- 
siderations, is  it  not  clear  that  the  entirety  of  our 
standards  of  knowledge  is  being  menaced  ?  The  pure 
white  light  is  being  broken  into  the  various  beams 
that  compose  it,  and  many  there  are  who  see  not  even 
so  much  as  one  whole  color,  but  only  some  one  hue  of 
that  color  in  the  great  spectrum.  The  clear  organi- 
zation and  evaluation  of  the  knowledge  we  now  have 
seems  at  the  present  time  of  more  importance  than 
all  the  stray  advances  hither  and  thither. 


STANDARDS  OF  GRADUATE  WORK     57 

Our  standards  of  knowledge  therefore  need  to  "be 
centred  in  the  general  body  of  ascertained  truth.  We 
must  take  our  position,  in  the  words  of  Francis 
Bacon,  that  "  philosophy  and  universality  are  not 
idle  studies,"  and  we  must  carry  this  so  far  as  to  be- 
lieve that  only  in  the  light  of  the  universal  shall  we 
understand  the  worth  and  bearing  of  the  particular. 
And  as  the  only  available  practical  help  toward 
securing  this  attitude  of  mind  in  our  graduate  stu- 
dents, we  must  insist  on  a  clear  and  pure  preliminary 
training  in  liberal  college  studies,  followed  by  such  a 
training  in  their  graduate  work  as  constantly  keeps 
them  in  touch  with  the  community  of  intellectual  in- 
terests outside  their  special  field  of  study.  And  to 
secure  this  in  turn,  we  should  aim  to  secure  as  gradu- 
ate students  only  men  of  strong,  all-round  ability, 
open  vision  and  wide  sympathies.  In  short  we  must, 
first  of  all,  secure  the  right  kind  of  man  as  a  gradu- 
ate student.  Having  done  this,  we  may  rest  assured 
that  all  other  desirable  results  may  be  made  to  follow. 

2.  When  the  harmonious  standards  of  general 
knowledge  are  lost  sight  of,  particular  standards 
suited  to  one  or  another  specialty  are  apt  to  take  their 
place.  Partly  as  a  result  of  this,  there  comes  a  cor- 
responding change  in  the  standards  of  expression. 
When  the  broad  view  is  lost,  simplicity  and  universal- 
ity of  statement,  and  a  consequent  attractiveness  and 


58  AMERICAN   LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

beauty  of  presentation,  are  apt  to  suffer.  It  is  not 
enough  that  a  book  or  dissertation  in  the  field  of  schol- 
arship be  accurate  and  painstaking,  if  it  is  to  survive 
in  the  recollection  of  men.  As  we  review  in  thought 
the  books  and  papers  which  have  made  a  mark  on  the 
intellectual  life  of  any  period,  it  is  easy  to  see  that 
many  able  contributions  to  knowledge  have  passed 
into  oblivion  because  they  were  not  engaging  and 
readable,  whereas  one  of  the  distinctive  marks  of  the 
finest  class  of  such  compositions  is  their  convincing 
charm  of  style.  These  are  the  classics  of  science  and 
philosophy,  as  well  as  of  literature.  A  scientific 
writer  who  has  the  artist's  sense  has  thus  an  advan- 
tage over  his  equally  able  rival,  and  sometimes  over 
his  abler  rival,  who  lacks  this  sense.  I^ow  one  of  the 
most  evident  faults  of  the  mass  of  specialized  publi- 
cations which  now  occupy  the  main  place  in  our  lit- 
erature of  scholarship  is  a  sort  of  solemn  pedantry. 
This  springs  from  the  entire  subordination  of  the 
writer  to  his  restricted  theme,  and  to  the  particular 
technique  of  language  which  belongs  to  his  specialty. 
He  does  not  dominate  his  subject,  but  is  mastered  by 
it.  He  therefore  writes  too  much  in  a  dialect,  and  not 
in  a  literary  way.  He  becomes  dry  and  lifeless.  Of 
course  every  subject  and  every  subdivision  of  a  sub- 
ject has  its  own  furniture  of  ideas  and  must  make 


STANDARDS  OF  GRADUATE  WORK      59 

use  of  the  technical  words  which  alone  set  forth  these 
ideas  accurately.  But  this  has  been  fearfully  over- 
done. If  it  sufficed  a  ISTewton  to  define  the  elusive 
atom — whether  rightly  or  wrongly  is  of  no  import- 
ance here — as  "  the  least  part  of  matter/'  ought  we 
not  to  take  courage  from  his  example  and  insist  that 
technical  terms,  except  when  necessary,  and  highly 
formal  language,  and  in  fact  all  forms  of  swollen  dic- 
tion, be  excluded  from  the  scholar's  writing.  The 
difficulty  of  the  ideas  is  sufficient  without  enveloping 
them  in  a  fog  of  words.  Let  us  somehow  manage  to 
keep  the  common  store  of  pure  English  as  the  one 
treasury  to  which  we  resort  for  everything  common 
English  words  can  express.  In  this  way  alone  shall 
we  be  able  to  preserve  a  general  reading  interest 
which  will  steadily  connect  the  publications  in  one 
department  of  knowledge  with  the  publications  in 
another.  Descartes  has  said  that  clearness  is  a  test 
of  truth.  Without  going  so  far  as  to  reverse  this  and 
to  assert  that  obscurity  of  statement  is  evidence  of 
error,  we  may  at  least  use  the  maxim  as  a  warning  to 
all  men  who  are  prone  to  write  in  a  formidable  tech- 
nical dialect.    * 

One  other  thing  may  be  said  in  this  connection: 
Pretentiousness  of  any  sort  is  unscholarly,  whether 
it  be  in  the  form  of  conceit  as  to  the  value  of  one's 


60  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

own  thoughts  or  in  the  form  of  grave  pedantry  in 
proclaiming  them  to  others.  And,  lastly,  on  this 
point  it  may  be  asserted  that  the  man  who  is  a  slave 
to  a  technical  terminology  is  in  constant  danger  of 
getting  away  from  the  concrete  truth  of  what  he  is 
studying  into  a  region  of  artificial  construction,  where 
he  is  so  much  occupied  with  the  scaffolding  and  outer 
appliances  that  he  mistakes  work  on  these  for  work 
on  the  real  building. 

3.  Back  of  all  standards  of  knowledge  and  expres- 
sion in  the  scholar's  life  lie  his  standards  of  judg- 
ment. On  these,  more  than  on  anything  else,  depend 
the  genuineness  and  permanence  of  what  he  does. 
We  may  leave  geniuses  aside  in  this  discussion,  be- 
cause there  is  no  use  or  need  of  legislation  for  them, 
and  after  all  they  are  very  few  in  number,  supreme 
as  their  distinction  is.  And  yet,  even  in  the  case  of 
geniuses,  we  shall  find  more  instances  of  soimd  com- 
mon-sense than  might  be  expected.  But  what  of  the 
mass  of  scholars  ?  What  is  to  be  the  ultimate  guar- 
antee to  mankind  generally  that  their  work  is  intrin- 
sically valuable,  whether  it  be  brilliant  or  plain,  ex- 
tensive or  limited,  commanding  or  humble  ?  Faraday 
somewhere  writes  that  the  education  of  the  judgment 
is  the  chief  benefit  of  a  scientific  training,  and  Hux- 
ley has  told  us  that  scientific  ability  in  its  last  analy- 
sis is  nothing  less  and  nothing  else  than  "  trained 


STANDARDS  OP  GRADUATE  WORK     61 

common-sense."  How  this  throws  ns  back  on  the 
personality  of  the  man  whom  we  are  to  encourage  to 
be  a  graduate  student!  It  thus  becomes  primarily 
the  question  not  of  what  he  can  know,  how  he  can 
express  it,  or  how  much  he  can  do,  but  what  kind  of 
a  man  he  is.  The  reasonings  and  conclusions  of  a 
vain  man  will  be  tinged  with  vanity.  The  judgments 
of  a  man  "  deep  versed  in  books,  but  shallow  in  him- 
self," will  not  permanently  appeal  to  the  respect  of 
his  fellow  men.  The  capricious  or  adventurous  or 
self-advertising  scholar  is,  so  far  forth,  not  a  true 
scholar.  The  fate  of  our  higher  studies,  in  their 
effect  on  the  men  we  influence,  depends  first  of  all 
on  what  kind  of  men  we  are.  The  kind  of  scholar 
any  man  is  to  become,  so  far  as  the  abiding  value  of 
his  influence  goes,  is  determined  in  the  last  resort 
not  so  much  by  what  he  knows  or  says,  as  by  what 
he  believes  and  loves.  He  must  have  the  lover's  in- 
stinct, almost  the  art  of  divination.  Like  the  miner, 
he  must  have  the  eye  that  knows  the  ores  of  gold 
from  fool's  gold.  The  student  who  naturally  longs 
to  know  the  things  of  most  worth,  and  searches  for 
them  in  all  simplicity  and  sincerity,  and  purposes  to 
turn  all  to  the  best  account  by  making  his  acquire- 
ments accessible  and  serviceable  to  his  fellow  men,  is 
the  only  kind  of  man  who  ought  to  be  encouraged  to 
enter  our  graduate  schools.     And  this  kind  of  man 


62  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

is  most  naturally  bred  in  the  comradeship  of  our  col- 
lege life  and  in  the  atmosphere  of  liberal  studies. 
What  a  mistake  to  fail  in  any  way  to  make  our  gradu- 
ate schools  supremely  attractive  to  just  this  sort  of 
man.  Given  the  personal  qualities  indicated  and  a 
suitable  college  training,  and  on  top  of  this  a  life  in 
graduate  studies  environed  by  the  friendships  that 
arise  from  the  constant  interchange  of  ideas  between 
men  studying  in  different  departments  of  knowledge, 
how  can  the  young  scholar,  so  circumstanced,  fail  to 
develop  that  "  trained  common-sense,"  that  well- 
poised  judgment  which  must  enlighten  all  his  think- 
ing and  all  his  doing  if  he  is  to  be  the  scholar  we  are 
describing. 

,  It  has  often  been  debated  whether  the  theoretical 
or  the  practical  mind  is  the  higher  type.  If  the 
terms  are  used  in  their  proper  sense,  it  seems  to  me 
there  can  be  only  one  answer :  The  practical  mind  is 
the  better,  because  sound  judgment  which  is  essen- 
tial to  all  sane  scholarship,  is  an  eminently  practical 
thing.  It  is  this  that  transforms  knowledge  into  wis- 
dom. The  brilliant  theoretical  scholar,  without  this 
anchorage,  is  structurally  weak.  But  let  us  not  mis- 
understand what  this  practical  mind  is.  It  is  not  cut 
off  from  theory.  In  fact  the  highest  practical  schol- 
ars are  tliose  most  deeply  grounded  in  theoretical 
knowledge.     But  they  differ  from  the  merely  theoreti- 


STANDARDS  OF  GRADUATE  WORK      63 

cal  scholars  in  being  able  to  use  that  knowledge 
steadily  in  applying  it  to  tbe  best  advantage,  and 
consequently  the  man  who  is  a  practical  scholar  in 
this  sense  is  the  only  one  who  unites  the  best  traits 
of  the  theoretical  and  practical  mind.  So  when  we 
see  men  of  flighty  judgment,  erratic  purposes,  and 
unsteady  vision,  let  us  keep  them  out  of  our  gTaduate 
schools  as  surely  as  we  keep  out  the  drone  or  ought 
to  keep  out  the  dullard. 

At  this  time,  more  than  ever  before,  business  and 
professional  life,  with  their  attractive  careers  and 
dazzling  rewards,  are  taking  most  of  the  able  men  of 
the  country.  The  attractions  of  the  scholar's  life  are 
not  relatively  as  great  as  they  were  a  generation  ago, 
nor  is  the  honor  paid  to  the  scholar  so  great  in  our 
land  as  in  the  older  civilizations  of  Great  Britain, 
France,  and  Germany.  And  yet  on  the  little  band  of 
scholars  in  the  liberal  arts  and  sciences  depends,  more 
than  ever  before,  the  tone  of  our  nation  in  things  in- 
tellectual and  moral.  We  have  already  too  many 
second-rate  and  third-rate  and  fourth-rate  men  among 
our  scholars.  We  shall  never  be  short  of  these.  But 
on  our  graduate  schools  in  the  liberal  studies  rests 
the  supreme  privilege  and  duty  of  standing  more 
resolutely  than  ever  for  the  best  standards  of  knowl- 
edge, expression,  and  judgTnent,  so  that  the  small 
company  of  picked  men  who  are  best  fitted  by  reason 


64  MIERICAN   LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

of  their  high  manhood  to  become  our  best  scholars 
will  naturally  resort  to  our  graduate  schools  and  lift 
them,  and  with  them  the  higher  American  scholar- 
ship, to  a  level  never  attained  before.  And  may  we 
live  to  see  that  day! 


IV 


THE  PEESEISTT  PEEIL  TO  LIBEKAL 

EDUCATION  1 

Liberal  education,  like  political  liberty,  is  always 
worth  preserving  and  always  in  peril.  In  such 
causes,  if  anywhere,  men  need  to  be  ever  resolute  as 
well  as  intelligent,  for  only  thus  does  it  become  pos- 
sible, even  when  distressed,  to  face  grave  crises  with- 
out becoming  for  an  instant  pessimistic,  inasmuch 
as  the  priceless  value  of  what  we  are  seeking  to  de- 
fend assures  us  that  our  efforts  are  well  worth 
making  and  that  no  effort  is  too  great  in  maintaining 
so  good  a  cause. 

We  have  such  a  cause  to-day,  the  cause  of  liberal 
education.  I  need  not  argue  in  this  presence  that  as 
it  prevails  our  American  life  is  lifted,  and  that  as  it 
fails  our  American  life  is  degraded.  It  is  to-day,  as 
ever,  in  peril,  but  in  unusual  peril  as  embodied  in  its 
noblest  representative,  the  American  college. 

Let  us  picture  the  situation  in  its  worst  possible 

outcome.    Suppose  the  chances  are  that  the  college  is 

*  Read  before  the  National  Educational  Association  at  its 
Boston  meeting,  general  session,  Monday  evening,  July  6,  1903. 

65 


GG  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

to  fail,  to  be  crushed  out  between  the  upper  and 
nether  millstones  of  professional  and  secondary 
schools  by  reason  of  the  violent  demand  for  something 
more  "practical.''  What  then?  If  it  must  go,  it 
must  go,  of  course.  But  ought  it  to  go  ?  And  if  not, 
ought  it  to  go  without  a  struggle  ?  Those  who  know 
most  about  colleges  think  not,  while  those  who  know 
least  about  them — and  they  form  a  huge  majority — 
are  often  indifferent  and  sometimes  hostile.  Scarcely 
one  in  a  hundred  of  our  young  men  of  college  age  has 
gone  to  college.  This  little  band  of  alumni,  at  least, 
is  with  the  college,  and  so  is  the  rest  of  the  better  in- 
telligence of  the  land.  But  educated  intelligence 
does  not  always  prevail  over  ignorance,  even  in  de- 
ciding matters  of  education.  One  can  hardly  fail, 
when  painting  the  danger  at  its  blackest,  to  recall 
the  great  words  of  Stein,  when  appealing  to  his  fellow 
Prussians  in  the  ISTapoleonic  wars :  "  We  must  look 
the  possibility  of  failure  firmly  in  the  face,  and  con- 
sider well  .  .  .  that  this  contest  is  begun  less  in  re- 
gard to  the  probability  of  success  than  to  the  certainty 
that  without  it  destruction  is  not  to  be  avoided." 

It  is  by  no  means  as  black  as  that,  nor  does  it  seem 
likely  to  become  so.  But  even  if  the  peril  were  far 
greater  than  it  is,  there  would  be  no  good  reason  why 
we  should  not  continue  the  struggle.  There  is  good 
reason  to  believe  the  forces  with  us  are  strong  enough, 


THE  PRESENT  PERIL  67 

not  only  to  save,  but  to  strengthen  the  American  col- 
lege, and  that  when  once  its  real  value  is  brought 
home  anew  to  the  minds  and  consciences  of  men,  it 
will  assert  its  rights  with  ample  power. 

Let  us  think  for  a  moment  of  what  the  American 
college  is.  It  has  been  evolved  out  of  our  own  needs 
and  has  proved  its  extraordinary  usefulness  by  a  long 
record.  It  has  been  democratic  in  its  freedom  of  ac- 
cess and  in  the  prevailing  tone  of  its  life.  It  has  fur- 
nished our  society  and  State  with  a  small  army  of 
well-trained  men.  In  it  supremely  are  centred  our 
best  hopes  for  liberal  education,  both  as  focused  in  the 
college  itself  and  as  radiating  outward  on  the  secon- 
dary schools  below  and  the  professional  schools  above. 
It  is  the  best  available  safeguard  against  the  mechani- 
cal cramping  of  an  unliberalized  technical  education. 
It  is  our  one  available  centre  of  organization  for  true 
universities.  It  has  produced  a  class  of  men  un- 
equalled in  beneficent  influence  by  any  other  class  of 
equal  numbers  in  our  history. 

In  the  rush  of  American  life  it  has  stood  as  the 
quiet  and  convincing  teacher  of  higher  things.  It  has 
been  preparing  young  men  for  a  better  career  in  the 
world  by  withdrawing  them  awhile  from  the  world 
to  cultivate  their  minds  and  hearts  by  contact  with 
things  intellectual  and  spiritual  in  a  society  devoted 
to  those  invisible  things  on  which  the  abiding  great- 


68  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

ness  of  our  life  depends.  By  reason  of  this  training 
most  college  men  have  become  better  than  they  would 
have  been,  and  better  in  important  respects  than  they 
could  have  been,  had  they  not  gone  to  college.  Their 
vision  has  been  cleared  and  widened,  and  their  aims 
have  been  elevated.  I^ot  least  of  all,  they  have  been 
taught  incessantly  the  lesson,  so  deeply  needed  to 
steady  them  in  our  fiercely  practical  surroundings, 
that  the  making  of  a  good  living  is  not  so  important  as 
the  making  of  a  good  life.  The  college  has  proved 
its  right  to  live.  To  preserve,  maintain,  and  energize 
it  to  its  highest  capacity  for  good,  to  prune  its  ex- 
cesses, strengthen  its  weak  places  and  supply  its  needs 
is  therefore  the  bounden  duty  of  those  who  care  for 
the  best  interests  of  our  nation. 

The  perils  which  beset  it  come  from  various 
sources  —  first,  from  the  common  defects  of  our 
American  civilization;  second,  from  the  weaker  ten- 
dencies in  young  men ;  and  third,  from  the  confusion 
of  counsels  inside  the  college  itself.  The  first  two  we 
must  be  prepared  to  encounter  always,  but  the  last 
one  ought  to  be  avoidable. 

This  is  no  place  to  draw  up  a  catalogue  of  our  com- 
mon defects  as  a  people.  Our  virtues  we  know  well. 
They  are  self-reliance,  quick  ingenuity,  adventurous- 
ness,  and  a  buoyant  optimism.  Our  national  faults 
are  not  so  pleasant  to  think  of — as,  for  example,  the 


THE  PRESENT  PERIL  69 

faults  of  boastful  vulgarity  and  reckless  excitability. 
Yet  there  are  some  that  must  be  mentioned  as  being 
specially  perilous  to  our  college  education.  The  chief 
one,  I  think,  is  commercialism,  the  feverish  pursuit 
of  what  "  pays  "  as  the  one  end  of  life.  Are  we  not 
subjected  to-day,  as  never  before,  to  demands  for 
teaching  the  things  of  commerce  as  part  of  the  col- 
lege course  ?  And  are  not  the  mechanical  arts  and 
crafts,  admirable  indeed  in  their  true  uses,  trying  to 
mix  in  with  the  other  things  as  though  they  were  of 
the  same  family  of  studies,  and  saying  they  must 
have  room  in  the  same  house  even  if  other  members 
of  the  family  are  pushed  out.  Are  not  technical 
studies  being  called  liberal,  and  is  not  even  the  tech- 
nique of  the  professions  sometimes  labelled  liberal 
also,  on  the  plea  that  all  knowledge  is  liberalizing? 
So  it  is,  but  in  what  differing  degrees  and  senses! 
The  instinct  for  the  useful  is  being  perverted  and  ex- 
alted above  the  love  of  knowledge  as  a  chief  end. 
And  why  ?  Because  what  is  wanted  is  something  im- 
mediately, obviously,  almost  mercenarily  useful.  Is 
it  not  time  we  read  again  the  books  of  philosophy  to 
learn  again  that  the  true  utility  is  the  long  utility 
which  serves  to  make  a  whole  life  useful,  and  that  it 
is  the  end  for  which  men  live  that  makes  them  useful 
or  useless  ?  Do  we  not  feel  that  we  are  here  coming 
close  to  the  sanctions  of  religion  and  need  to  answer 


70  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

that  deep  question,  What  shall  it  profit  a  man  ?  once 
more. 

Another  peril  is  a  companion  and  natural  follower 
of  commercialism,  namely,  illiteracy.  Not  in  the 
meaning  of  that  word  in  the  census  tables,  but  in  the 
meaning  of  ignorance  of  good  literature.  "  l^o  man 
can  serve  books  and  mammon,"  said  Richard  de  Bury 
long  ago.  Is  it  not  a  fact  that  the  majority  of  college 
students  to-day  are  not  familiar  with  the  common- 
places of  literary  information  and  the  standard  books 
of  history,  poetry,  and  so  on.  Do  they  know  that 
greatest  book  of  our  tongue,  the  English  Bible,  as 
their  fathers  did  ?  What  have  so  many  of  them  been 
reading?  The  newspapers,  of  course,  and  fiction — 
not  always  the  better  fiction.  As  between  books  and 
the  short  stories  in  magazines,  how  few  read  the 
former!  I  am  not  now  speaking  of  the  hard  books 
of  philosophy  and  science,  or  generally  of  the  books 
that  involve  severe  thought,  but  of  the  readable,  de- 
lightful books,  the  pleasant  classics  of  English. 
What  a  confession  of  the  state  of  things  it  is  that  col- 
leges have  to  make  the  reading  of  a  few  books  of 
English  literature  a  set  task  as  an  entrance  require- 
ment, and  then  ask  formal  questions  on  what  ought 
to  be  the  free  and  eager  reading  of  every  boy  at  home. 
How  far  it  is  true  that  the  advocacy  of  teaching 
science  may  have  operated,  not  to  beget  a  taste  for 


THE  PRESENT  PERIL  71 

science,  but  merely  a  neglect  of  literature,  is  perhaps 
idle  to  ask.  It  is  at  least  true  that  these  neglecters  of 
literature  are  not  usually  giving  laborious  hours  to 
reading  scientific  works.  Perhaps  some  day  our 
schools  generally  will  get  "  Headers  "  that  have  lit- 
erature in  them,  and  that  will  help  matters  a  little. 
But  the  so-called  students  who  do  not  care  to  read,  or 
do  not  know  how  to  read  as  all  students  should,  are 
with  us  in  abundance  as  an  ever-present  peril.  The 
quiet  book  by  the  quiet  lamp  is  a  good  charmer. 
Here  the  true  student  forms  his  friendships  with  the 
masters  of  thought  and  fancy ;  here  they  speak  to  him 
not  under  the  constraints  of  the  classroom;  here  he 
may  relax  without  weakness,  adventure  without  limit, 
soar  without  fear,  and  hope  without  end.  It  is  the  old 
story.  Books  are,  as  Huxley  put  it,  ''  his  main  help- 
ers," and  the  free  reading  outside  the  set  tasks  is, 
perhaps  next  to  music,  his  most  ennobling  pleasure. 
The  loss  of  this  is  to-day  the  thing  that  does  so  much 
to  deprive  our  college  life  and  conversation  of  the  fine 
flavor  of  that  much  misunderstood  thing.  Culture. 

Another  peril  comes  from  the  students  themselves. 
It  is  a  disposition  to  do  the  pleasant  rather  than  the 
hard  thing,  even  when  the  hard  thing  happens  to  be 
the  best  thing.  This  is  most  common  among  those 
whose  main  interest  in  college  life  is  social.  It  is  also 
fostered  by  the  general  absorption  in  athletics,  though 


72  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

it  is  not  so  much  the  athletes  who  are  affected — for 
they  are  at  least  used  to  a  vigorous  discipline  in  things 
physical — as  it  is  the  mass  of  onlookers  who  attend 
the  games  and  waste  so  much  time  discussing  them. 
This  social  and  athletic  environment,  with  all  its  un- 
deniable and,  I  believe,  indispensable  good,  is  just 
now  doing  much  harm  to  the  intellectual  life  of  stu- 
dents. Because  it  is  unduly  exaggerated  it  is  operat- 
ing powerfully  to  disperse  the  student's  energies  in 
a  miscellany  of  things  outside  his  studies.  Things 
which  should  come  second,  as  the  relaxation  of  those 
whose  first  business  is  study,  often  come  first,  and 
studies  must  get  what  they  can  of  what  is  left.  How 
natural  it  is  that  such  students  should  crowd  into  the 
easier  courses.  They  have  little  interest  left  for  any- 
thing intellectual.  So  far  as  this  occurs,  liberal  edu- 
cation dies  and  college  students  come  to  their  man- 
hood with  men's  bodies  and  boys'  minds.  What  is 
being  lost  is  the  development  of  virile  intellectual 
power,  a  thing  which  simply  cannot  grow  without 
exercise. 

This  is  a  matter  which  goes  far  below  the  question 
of  one  or  another  plan  of  studies,  though  it  is  greatly 
affected  by  the  relative  wisdom  or  unwisdom  of  what 
the  student  is  offered.  If  he  finds  a  course  which  im- 
pels him  and  his  comrades  to  regular  effort  day  by 
day,  and  also  gives  him  the  immense  help  that  comes 


THE  PRESENT  PERIL  73 

to  all  young  men  of  ordinary  abilities  from  moving 
together  with  their  fellows  in  the  same  direction,  his 
progress  in  studies  is  part  of  the  orderly  advance  of 
a  march,  with  little  chance  for  straggling  or  loitering. 
If  he  is  confused  by  failure  to  discover  that  there  is 
a  rational  order  of  studies  or  that  his  college  believes 
there  is  at  least  some  preferable  order  for  the  mass 
of  students,  he  thus  loses  much  or  all  of  a  kind  of 
help  he  ought  to  have.  If  the  educated  experience  of 
his  college  cannot  tell  him,  at  least  approximately, 
what  things  he  ought  to  take  and  some  definite  things 
which  all  college  students  ought  to  take,  how  is  he 
to  find  out  with  any  strong  probability  that  he  is  going 
straight  on  the  right  road  ?  Those  who  are  so  ready 
to  move  an  indefinite  distance  along  any  of  the  diverg- 
ing directions  of  elective  freedom  may  well  pause  to 
ask  whether  the  keen  words  of  Descartes  on  progress 
in  knowledge  are  not  wortli  heeding  in  this  connec- 
tion :  "  It  is  better  to  go  a  short  distance  on  the  right 
road  than  a  long  distance  on  the  wrong  one.'' 

The  love  of  freedom  from  control  and  of  pleasure 
in  our  labor  are  splendid  things.  They  are  at  once 
the  charm  and  peril  of  student  effort.  The  true  free- 
dom of  the  human  spirit  is  the  true  end  of  the  college 
course.  This  is  not  injured,  however,  by  creating 
places  where  students  may  go,  if  they  will,  and  where 
they  must  take  some  subjects  of  study  which  experi- 


74  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

ence  shows  to  be  eminently  fitted  in  their  combination 
to  serve  this  very  end.  We  are  asking  simply  for 
some  of  the  central  truths  of  history,  literature, 
science,  and  philosophy,  what  Locke  called  the  "  teem- 
ing truths,  rich  in  store,  with  which  they  furnish  the 
mind,  and  like  the  lights  of  heaven  are  not  only 
beautiful  and  entertaining  in  themselves,  but  give 
light  and  evidence  to  other  things  that  without  them 
could  not  be  seen  or  known."  ^  And  as  for  the  element 
of  pleasure,  why  should  we  not  desire  it  ?  How  ex- 
quisitely did  Aristotle  say,  "  Pleasure  perfects  labor, 
even  as  beauty  crowns  youth."  ^  J^ot  the  idle  pleasure, 
however,  but  the  achieved  pleasure,  the  deep  pleasure 
that  comes  from  noble  mastery,  from  winning  on  the 
hard-fought  field  of  athletics  of  the  mind,  and,  above 
all,  from  winning  in  the  fight  against  intellectual 
sloth  and  easy-going  indulgence — this  is  the  cro^\Ti 
of  our  best  young  college  manhood. 

A  few  words  must  suffice  to  set  forth  another  peril 
which  especially  besets  us  at  this  time.  It  is  the  peril 
of  confusion  in  college  counsels.  It  has  been  inevi- 
table because  of  the  extreme  diversity  of  educational 
conditions  in  our  land  and  because  of  conflicting 
theories  of  college  training. 

The  pole  of  law  and  the  pole  of  freedom  are  the 

'  Of  the  "Conduct  of  the  Human  Understanding,"  43. 
'"Ethics,"  X,  4,  8. 


THE  PRESENT  PERIL  75 

two  contrasted  standpoints,  with  many  a  halting- 
place  between.  It  is,  of  course,  clear  that  any  attempt 
to  cast  all  our  colleges  in  one  mould  is  foredoomed 
to  failure.  We  must  seek  some  other  remedy.  But 
if  the  present  confusion  cannot  be  cured,  the  colleges 
will  be  seriously  and  permanently  weakened.  Here 
at  least  we  must  do  something,  and  do  it  soon.  The 
colleges  must  at  all  events  do  one  thing,  and  that  is 
to  make  it  as  clear  as  possible  what  it  is  they  are 
severally  seeking  to  accomplish.  Certain  very  prac- 
tical questions  need  to  be  answered.  They  are  ques- 
tions of  the  substance  and  aim  of  liberal  education. 

One  of  the  questions  is.  Should  a  college  exact  a 
substantial  amount  of  prescribed  studies  for  its  de- 
gree ?  If  so,  there  is  room  to  organize  our  bache- 
lor's degrees  according  to  the  types  now  slowly, 
though  imperfectly,  evolving  in  our  time.  If  not, 
the  free  elective  plan  with  one  bachelor's  degree  is  the 
true  alternative.  There  are  many  halting-places  be- 
tween, but  none  of  them  is  a  resting-place.  Here, 
then,  is  a  basis  of  clear  division  without  confusion, 
and  one  that  plain  folk  can  understand.  The  nature 
of  the  answer  given  will  depend  on  whether  or  no  a 
given  college  believes  that  there  are  substantial  stud- 
ies above  the  stage  of  our  preparatory  schooling 
which  are  essential  to  the  best  liberal  education.  In- 
termediate or  minimizing  positions  on  this  question 


76  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

will  result  in  corresponding  vagueness  and  uncer- 
tainty in  organization,  and  will  tend  to  perpetuate  the 
confusion.  It  is  worth  sacrificing  something,  even  in 
a  transitional  stage,  for  the  sake  of  the  assured  gain 
that  accrues  to  a  well-defined  plan.  If  it  turns  out  to 
be  a  wrong  plan,  its  defects  become  visible  sooner  and 
may  be  more  promptly  amended. 

Let  us  ask  a  second  question.  Is  there  or  is  there 
not  a  proper  field  of  college  studies,  exclusive  of  the 
fields  of  secondary,  technical,  and  professional  learn- 
ing? If  so,  such  studies  alone  should  constitute  the 
college  course.  If  not,  studies  from  the  other  fields 
may  be  brought  in.  It  will  not  do  to  say  no  sharp 
line  can  be  drawn  between  fields  of  education  for  the 
reason  that  the  domain  of  knowledge  is  one,  and  all 
knowledge  is  liberalizing.  Follow  this  out  consist- 
ently, and  important  distinctions,  needed  to  effect  a 
working  scheme  of  division  for  the  parts  of  education, 
are  obscured.  We  may  distinguish  between  gi'eat 
regions,  even  though  we  are  unable  to  settle  all 
boundary  disputes.  There  are  enough  college  studies 
of  undisputedly  and  eminently  liberal  character  to 
fill  the  college  course  to  repletion.  Let  those  who  be- 
lieve this  organize  accordingly,  and  let  those  who 
believe  that  any  respectable  study  possible  to  students 
of  college  age  may  be  put  in  the  college  course,  put 
such  studies  in.  The  two  kinds  of  colleges  will  then 
be  distinctly  discernible. 


THE  PRESENT  PERIL  77 

If  the  college  is  to  prevail,  the  confusion,  though 
not  necessarily  a  division  of  counsels,  must  cease. 
The  two  opposing  tendencies  indicate  the  two  avail- 
able lines  for  at  least  making  the  division  clear  to  the 
country  at  large.  Intermediate  positions  are  unstable 
and  transitional.  They  make  confusion.  What 
parents,  teachers,  and  students  need  to  know  as  defi- 
nitely as  possible  is  precisely  what  it  is  a  given  col- 
lege stands  for.  Uncertainty  here  breeds  loss  of  con- 
fidence in  liberal  education.  It  is  to  be  hoped  that 
most  of  the  colleges  will  be  able  to  stand  together.  If 
they  do,  I  hope  and  believe  they  will  stand  for  the 
conviction  that  there  are  college  studies  essential  for 
all  who  take  the  college  course,  that  it  is  the  comple- 
tion of  these  which  opens  to  the  student  the  best  all- 
round  view  of  the  knowledge  most  serviceable  for  his 
whole  after-life,  and  that  the  ideas  of  discipline  and 
duty,  in  studies  as  well  as  in  conduct,  underlie  any 
real  development  of  the  one  true  freedom  of  the 
human  spirit. 


THE    LEi^GTH    OF    THE    COLLEGE 

COUKSE  1 

The  American  college  is  the  vital  centre  of  our  sys- 
tem of  higher  education.  With  all  its  imperfections, 
it  serves,  as  probably  no  other  institution  can  serve, 
to  uphold  the  standards  of  the  secondary  schools  and 
to  lift  from  below  the  level  of  professional  schools.  It 
occupies  an  intermediate  field  of  its  own,  not  per- 
fectly defined,  but  as  clearly  defined  as  the  fields  of 
our  secondary  or  professional  education.  It  should 
be  allowed  and  encouraged,  as  they  are,  to  organize 
itself  completely  and  efficiently  according  to  the  laws 
of  its  own  life,  without  curtailment  or  encroachment. 
Otherwise  we  shall  be  in  the  absurd  and  uncivilized 
position  of  refusing  to  try  for  the  best  college  educa- 
tion, and  shall  be  sacrificing  to  commercial  and  utili- 
tarian demands  the  one  educational  agency  most 
needed  to  purify  and  elevate  the  too  materialistic  tone 
of  our  American  life. 

^  Read  before  the  National  Educational  Association   (Depart- 
ment of  Higher  Education)  at  Boston,  July  7,  1903. 

78 


LENGTH  OF  COLLEGE  COURSE       79 

By  tradition  the  length  of  the  college  course  is  four 
years.  This  is  almost  universal.  There  seems  to  be 
no  good  reason  a  priori  why  it  should  have  been  four, 
rather  than  five  or  three,  or  even  two.  But  the  prac- 
tical unanimity  of  the  tradition  indicates  that  thus 
far,  at  least,  the  period  of  four  years  has  been  found 
to  be  well  suited  to  our  needs.  Analyze  this  as  we 
may,  it  is  a  definite  result  of  long  and  wide  experi- 
ence and  one  which  should  not  be  discarded  without 
the  fullest  consideration. 

It  is  argued,  however,  that  conditions  are  changing 
and  that  a  shorter  time  must  be  allotted  if  we  would 
save  the  American  college.  This  argument  rests 
mainly  on  the  increasing  age  of  the  student  at  en- 
trance to  college  and  the  lengthening  courses  of  the 
professional  schools.  The  fact  that  college  graduates 
are  kept  back  from  entering  business  life  until  they 
are  twenty-two  need  not  disturb  us  on  economic 
gi'ounds,  because  it  is  also  a  fact  that  the  marked  in- 
crease of  college  graduates  in  business  life  has  coin- 
cided with  the  very  period  in  which  the  age  of 
graduation  has  been  rising.  But  for  those  going  into 
professional  life  the  case  is  different.  Taking  eigh- 
teen as  the  average  age  of  entrance  to  college,  adding 
four  years  of  college  and  three  or,  as  it  may  soon  be, 
four  years  of  professional  study,  the  young  doctor  or 
lawyer  is  not  fledged  until  he  is  twenty-six.    A  year, 


80  AMERICAN   LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

or  even  two  years,  may  be  saved  by  reducing  the 
length  of  the  college  course. 

Let  us  admit^  at  once,  that  we  are  facing  a  serious 
economic  question.  The  saving  of  a  year  or  two  in 
time  and  money  will  in  many  cases  settle  the  question 
as  to  how  extended  an  education  a  young  man  can  get. 
Young  men  who  must  get  to  law  or  medicine  by 
twenty-four  must  forego  something  if  they  enter  col- 
lege at  eighteen.  'No  device  will  secure  them  eight 
years  of  educated  life  in  six.  The  brighter  and  more 
mature  among  them  may  perhaps  save  a  year  by  en- 
tering college  at  seventeen.  But  this  does  not  meet 
the  general  difficulty.  If  by  any  chance  they  enter  at 
sixteen,  they  will  be  found  as  a  rule  too  immature 
mentally  for  the  studies  and  too  immature  morally 
for  the  life  of  our  larger  modern  colleges.  This  solu- 
tion may  therefore  be  dismissed  as  insufficient  and 
unwise.  If  the  year  or  two  years  is  to  be  saved,  it 
must  be  taken  in  most  instances  from  the  college  or 
from  the  professional  school. 

We  may  as  well  admit  that  in  such  cases  the  college 
must  suffer  the  loss,  because  the  intending  doctor  or 
lawyer  cannot  escape  the  demands  of  the  professional 
schools.  His  livelihood  is  conditioned  on  completing 
his  professional  education,  and  this  settles  the  matter. 

But  does  it  settle  the  general  question  of  the  proper 
length  of  the  college  course  for  those  who  have  time 


LENGTH  OF  COLLEGE  COURSE       81 

to  take  it  ?  What  are  we  to  do  with  the  mass  of  stu- 
dents who  can  take  four  years  of  college  ?  Why  must 
their  course  be  shortened?  It  is  a  minority  which 
goes  on  to  law  and  medicine.  Some  better  reason 
must  be  found  than  the  fact  that  a  part  of  this  minor- 
ity cannot  remain  four  years.  If  it  were  true,  or  if  it 
becomes  true,  that  the  majority  of  young  men  suitable 
for  college  cannot  stay  throughout  the  present  course, 
then  it  may  be  a  shorter  course  must  be  established. 
Otherwise  it  does  not  appear  that  we  are  doing  a 
wrong  to  students  by  holding  them  four  years,  unless 
it  can  also  be  shown  that  a  three-year  or  a  two-year 
course  is  intrinsically  better  than  a  four-year  course 
for  American  young  men. 

This  is  to  me  the  one  question  of  real  difficulty.  I 
am  unable  to  see  that  young  men  generally  will  be 
better  trained  to  begin  as  lawyers  at  twenty-four  than 
at  twenty-five  or  twenty-six.  I  am  able  to  see  that 
many  cannot  afford  to  wait  so  long,  and  must  take 
what  they  can  get  in  the  shorter  time.  It  is  clear  that 
some  of  them  cannot  take  four  years  in  college.  It  is 
also  clear  that  giving  them  the  bachelor's  degree  at 
the  end  of  two  years  or  three  years  will  not  give  them 
an  education  of  four  years.  It  is  the  time  taken,  as 
well  as  the  studies  taken,  that  counts  heavily  if  a  per- 
manent impression  is  to  be  made.  Extended  time  in 
residence  given  to  unhurried  study,  and  not  rapidly 


82  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

formed  acquaintance  with  a  series  of  studies,  is  what 
is  needed.  And  when  we  realize  with  what  imperfect 
training  so  many  boys  come  from  the  schools,  it  may 
easily  take  four  years  to  outflank  their  deficiencies, 
correct  their  methods,  and  develop  even  a  semblance 
of  liberal  culture. 

Why,  then,  if  some  of  them  must  leave  college, 
should  they  not  leave,  as  some  now  do,  at  the  end  of 
two  years  or  three  years,  taking  with  them  their  valu- 
able half-loaf  or  three-quarters  loaf  of  college  life  and 
training?  It  is  worth  a  great  deal  to  them.  They 
will  find  most  of  the  professional  schools  ready  to 
receive  them,  and  some  of  them  ready  to  give,  if  not 
the  very  best,  at  least  a  good  professional  education. 
The  best  of  everything  in  education  cannot  be  had 
without  taking  the  best  time  needed.  In  fact  we  are 
exaggerating  the  situation,  for  if  all  professional 
schools  would  merely  go  so  far  as  to  exact  at  least 
two  years  of  college  as  prerequisite  to  entrance,  there 
would  be  a  gain  the  country  over  in  the  quality  of 
professional  students.  It  may,  perhaps,  be  thought 
that  the  three-year  course  will  bring  more  students  to 
college  and  more  college  graduates  to  professional 
schools.  This  is  a  matter  of  pure  speculation.  But 
suppose  it  does.  Is  it  clear  that  we  need  more  college 
students  with  shorter  education  than  they  have  now  ? 
Is  it  clear  that  we  need  proportionally  more  doctors 


LENGTH  OF  COLLEGE  COURSE       83 

and  lawyers  ?  The  desired  gain  in  quality  of  profes- 
sional students  can  be  secured  without  destroying  the 
four-year  course,  merely  by  exacting  generally  three 
years  of  college  as  a  minimum  entrance  requirement. 
Has  any  American  university  gone  farther  than  this 
in  dealing  with  the  students  of  its  own  college  who 
enter  its  own  law  or  medical  school  ? 

In  the  present  condition  of  affairs  in  our  land, 
viewed  in  its  entirety,  the  question  of  entrance  to  pro- 
fessional schools  and  the  question  of  the  proper  length 
of  the  college  course  are  two  distinct  questions.  By 
all  means  let  there  be  a  few  leaders  among  the  pro- 
fessional schools  exacting  a  college  degree  for  admis- 
sion, especially  if  it  be  possible  to  secure  this  on  the 
basis  of  a  full  college  course  completed  in  the  full 
time  without  haste  or  crowding.  The  time  may  per- 
haps come  when  all  good  schools  will  be  able  to  follow 
their  example.    But  it  has  not  come  yet. 

If,  therefore,  the  college  course  is  to  be  shortened, 
it  should  be  because  the  shorter  course  is  intrinsically 
better  for  the  mass  of  college  students.  Is  four  years 
of  American  college  education  better  than  three? 
Few  will  doubt  it  is  better  than  two.  Three  years  or 
f®ur  is  the  real  question. 

That  a  change  of  profound  importance  has  come 
over  our  colleges  in  the  last  thirty  years  none  will 
deny.    It  is  a  change  in  tone  and  spirit.     The  gains 


84  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

in  diversified  oppoTtunity  and  in  student  self-govern- 
ment have  been  immense.      There   have   also   been 
losses.     In  the  large  older  colleges  particularly  there 
has  been  an  accession  of  students  who  are  attracted 
more  by  the  social  and  athletic  life  than  by  studies. 
There  has  been  a  relaxing  of  effort,  a  disposition  to 
look  on  college  life  as  a  pleasant  social  episode.    The 
old-fashioned  college  with  its  simple  programme  of 
prescribed  studies  is  gone.     The  so-called  "  elective 
system ''  has  come  in  to  replace  it,  wholly  or  partly. 
To  rehabilitate  the  old  state  of  things  is  impossible 
and  undesirable.     To  endure  the  disintegi'ation  and 
confusion  in  intellectual  standards  which  has  ensued 
is  also  undesirable  and,  I  believe,  impossible.     The 
strength  of  opinion  favorable  to  the  four-year  course 
is  found  to  be  greatest  where  a  large  basis  of  pre- 
scribed studies  has  been  kept.     The  arguments  for  a 
shorter  course  are  most  influential  where  elective  free- 
dom prevails  most.    It  is  possible  to  argue  with  much 
effect  for  four  years  when  it  can  be  shown  that  a  fine 
education  is  given  because  of  the  very  definite  correla- 
tion of  studies  to  one  end — ^namely,  the  acquainting 
of  young  men  not  only  with  the  methods  of  knowl- 
edge, but  with  the  substance  of  things  important  for 
all  liberally  educated  men  to  know,  the  elemental 
things  which,  taken  together,  represent  the  stock  and 
staple  of  our  intellectual  inheritance  as  a  race.     This 


LENGTH  OF  COLLEGE  COURSE       85 

takes  considerable  time.  Supplement  this  with  a  first 
exploration  into  the  fields,  or,  far  better,  into  some 
definitely  mapped  field  of  elective  freedom  corre- 
sponding to  the  well-ascertained  aptitudes  rather  than 
the  chance  likings  of  the  student,  and  four  years  will 
be  found  none  too  much.  A  natural  break  between 
the  two  lower  and  two  upper  years  may  thus  easily 
be  made.  At  this  time,  if  the  hard  necessity  arises  so 
soon,  let  men  leave  who  must  leave  early.  The  bach- 
elor's degree  may  then  be  kept  for  those  who  do  the 
full  work  in  the  normal  time.  From  this  point  of 
view  the  four-year  course  is  in  every  way  worth  main- 
taining. 

But  if  the  principle  is  to  prevail  that,  once  in  col- 
lege, the  student  is  to  find  all  studies  elective,  the  case 
is  very  different.  !N^o  definite  programme  is  com- 
pleted for  the  mass  of  students  so  far  as  concerns  the 
specific  substance  of  what  they  study.  And  without 
this  an  important  common  element  is  subtracted.  A 
certain  effect  is  lost.  The  common  area  of  liberal 
culture,  in  which  all  educated  men  should  be  at  home, 
tends  to  shrink  and  vanish.  The  solidarity  of  the 
student  community,  the  intense  esprit  de  corps  which 
accompanies  movement  by  college  classes,  the  inti- 
macy of  the  community  in  things  of  common  intel- 
lectual acquaintance — all  these  are  weakened  by  dis- 
persion.   The  students  are  not  travelling  near  enough 


86  MIERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

in  the  same  direction  to  be  within  easy  hail  and  call. 
Such  a  condition  is  anomalous  in  education.  Sec- 
ondary education  below  the  college  gains  its  effect 
from  the  correlation  of  prescribed  studies,  so  as  to 
form  a  general  gymnastic  of  the  mind.  Professional 
education  above  the  college  is  unattainable  without 
the  mastery  of  correlated  subjects  prescribed  for  all. 
The  inner  relations  of  the  subjects  studied,  and  not 
the  preferences  of  immature  minds,  form  the  basis 
for  an  organized  course  of  study,  and  should  have 
much  to  do,  perhaps  most  to  do,  with  determining 
the  length  of  any  course.  College  education  alone, 
under  the  plan  of  free  election,  is  being  allowed  to 
wander  aimlessly,  as  though  there  were  no  general  and 
necessary  rational  relations  according  to  which  col- 
lege studies  should  be  combined  as  they  are  in  other 
fields  of  education.  The  student's  preference,  so  often 
determined  by  inadequate  knowledge  or  an  easy- 
going following  of  the  line  of  least  resistance,  is  dig- 
nified by  the  name  of  "  election,''  and  the  bewilder- 
ing mass  of  elective  studies  offered  him  is  seriously 
called  a  "  system."  "  System  "  it  may  be  to  others, 
but  not  to  him. 

How  can  a  definite  argument  for  a  discipline  and 
culture  of  four  years,  rather  than  of  three  years,  be 
erected  on  such  a  basis  ?  We  need  not  waste  time  in 
exploring  the  tangle  of  inner  reasons  which  indicate 


LENGTH  OF  COLLEGE  COURSE       87 

that  the  indefiniteness  and  heterogeneity  of  a  free 
elective  course  may  be  a  proper,  even  an  urgent, 
reason  for  shortening  it.  The  mere  fact  that  the 
movement  for  a  three-year  course  is  strongest  where 
elective  freedom  is  least  restricted  is  enough  indica- 
tion that  a  powerful  cause  operating  inside  the  college 
course  to  shorten  it  is  the  inability  of  a  purely  elective 
scheme  to  fill  out  four  years  with  profit  to  the  mass 
of  students. 

If  the  proposal  were  made  to  change  a  four-year 
course  in  elective  studies  to  a  three-year  course  with 
a  large  basis  of  prescribed  studies,  I  confess  the  three- 
year  course  would  seem  to  me  a  marked  improvement. 
And  unless  something  is  done  to  reduce  the  tangle  to 
order,  the  three-year  course  seems  to  be  inevitable  in 
some  places.  But  if  the  proposal  be  to  reduce  the 
other  type  of  four-year  course  to  three  years,  then  the 
loss  is  not  only  unnecessary,  but  is  in  every  way  un- 
desirable, because  it  means  the  loss  of  the  crowning 
year  in  a  definitely  rounded  plan,  the  consummate 
college  year  of  intellectual  development,  privilege, 
and  satisfaction. 

On  the  colleges,  therefore,  which  believe  in  main- 
taining a  large  basis  of  prescribed  studies  as  the  one 
sure  foundation  for  a  rational  plan  of  subsequent 
elective  studies  will  rest  the  duty  of  maintaining  a 
four-year  course.    They  will  need  to  make  sure  that 


88  AJVIERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

they  work  out  their  programme  in  true  accordance 
with  their  academic  confession  of  faith  and  secure  to 
their  students  at  all  hazards  the  few  fundamental 
studies,  well  and  amply  taught.  They  will  need  to 
be  resolute  in  teaching  young  men  that  there  is  no 
real  education  without  well-directed  effort ;  that  it  is 
not  doing  what  a  man  likes  or  dislikes  to  do,  but  the 
constant  exercise  in  doing  what  he  ought  to  do  in  mat- 
ters of  intellect  as  well  as  of  conduct,  whether  he  hap- 
pens to  like  it  or  not,  that  turns  the  frank,  careless, 
immature,  lovable  school-boy  into  the  strong,  well- 
trained  man  capable  of  directing  wisely  himself  and 
others.  If  they  fail  to  do  this  with  measurable  suc- 
cess, they  fail  to  justify  their  contention.  If  they 
succeed,  the  American  college  course  of  traditional 
length  and  largely  prescribed  content  may  be  trusted 
to  justify  itseK  triumphantly. 


VI 

THE  a:\iekican  college  1 

ITS    PLACE    AND    IMPORTANCE 

The  American  college  has  no  exact  counterpart  in  the 
educational  system  of  any  other  country.  The  ele- 
ments which  compose  it  are  derived,  it  is  true,  from 
European  systems,  and  in  particular  from  Great 
Britain.  But  the  form  under  which  these  elements 
have  been  finally  compounded  is  a  form  suggested 
and  almost  compelled  by  the  needs  of  our  national 
life.  Of  course  it  is  far  from  true  to  say  that  Ameri- 
can colleges  have  been  uninfluenced  in  their  organiza- 
tion by  European  tradition.  On  the  contrary,  the 
primary  form  of  organization  found  in  our  earliest 
colleges,  such  as  Harvard,  Yale,  and  Princeton,  is  in- 
herited from  the  collegiate  life  of  the  University  of 
Cambridge.  But  it  was  subjected  to  modification  at 
the  very  beginning,  in  order  to  adapt  the  infant  col- 
lege to  its  community,  and  progressively  modified 
from  time  to  time  in  order  to  keep  in  close  sympathy 

^  A  paper  published  for  the  Educational  Exhibit  of  the  United 
States  at  the  International  Exhibition  in  Paris,  1900,  and  the 
Universal  Exposition  in  St.  Loins,  1904. 

89 


90  AMERICAN   LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

with  the  civil,  ecclesiastical,  and  social  character  of 
the  growing  American  nation.  The  outcome  of  all 
this  has  been  an  institution  which,  while  deriving  by 
inheritance  the  elements  of  its  composition,  and  in 
some  sense  its  form,  has  managed  to  develop  for  itself 
a  form  of  organization  which  notably  differs  from  the 
old-world  schools. 

Moreover  the  college,  as  might  be  expected  from 
the  foregoing  considerations,  occupies  the  place  of 
central  importance  in  the  historic  outworking  of 
American  higher  education,  and  remains  to-day  the 
one  repository  and  shelter  of  liberal  education  as  dis- 
tinguished from  technical  or  commercial  training,  the 
only  available  foundation  for  the  erection  of  univer- 
sities containing  faculties  devoted  to  the  maintenance 
of  pure  learning,  and  the  only  institution  which  can 
furnish  the  preparation  which  is  always  desired,  even 
though  it  is  not  yet  generally  exacted,  by  the  better 
professional  schools.  Singularly  enough,  but  not  un- 
naturally, the  relation  of  directive  influence  sustained 
to-day  by  our  colleges  to  the  university  problem  is 
not  unlike  the  relation  held  in  the  Middle  Ages  by  the 
inferior  faculty  of  arts  at  the  University  of  Paris  to 
the  affairs  of  the  university  as  a  whole. -^  The  points 
of  resemblance  are  marked  and  are  of  a  generic  char- 

^  Rachdall:  "Universities  of  Europe  in  the  ?.Iiddle  Ages,"  Vol. 
I,  p.  318. 


THE  AMERICAN  COLLEGE  91 

acter.     In  both  cases  the  college,  or  faculty  of  arts, 
appears  as  the  preliminary  instructor  in  the  essentials 
of  liberal  education.     In  both  cases  this  earlier  edu-   • 
cation  is  recognized  as  the  proper  prerequisite  for 
later  study  in  the  professional  faculties.     In  both 
cases  the  inferior  faculty,  even  if  still  undeveloped 
or  but  partially  developed,  contains  the  germ  of  the 
higher  university  faculty  of  pure  learning,  the  fac- 
ulty of  arts,  sciences,  and  philosophy.    In  this  there  is 
much  that  is  remarkable,  but  nothing  novel.    For  the 
American  college  in  this  respect  merely  perpetuates 
and  develops  a  fundamental  tradition  of  liberal  learn- 
ing, which  found  its  way  from  Paris  through  Oxford 
to   Cambridge,    and   then   from    Cambridge   to   our 
shores.     The  parallel  of  our  college  history  with  the 
old-world  history  holds  good  in  other  important  re- 
spects, and  would  be  most  interesting  to  trace.     Still, 
in  order  to  understand  the  precise  nature  and  unique 
influence  of  the  college  in  American  education,  it  is 
not  necessary  here  to  trace  step  by  step  the  story  of 
its  development,  for  in  its  various  forms  of  present 
organization  it  reveals  not  only  the  normal  type  which 
has  been  evolved,  but  also  survivals  of  past  stages  of 
development,  instances  of  variation  and  even  of  de-  \ 
generation  from  the  type,  and  interesting  present  ex- 
periments which  may  to  some  extent  foreshadow  the 
future. 


92  AMERICAN   LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

THE    OLD-FASHIONED    COLLEGE 

The  three  commonly  accepted  divisions  of  educa- 
tion into  the  primary,  secondary  and  higher  stages, 
while  fully  recognized  in  America,  are  not  followed 
rigorously  in  our  organization.  The  primary  educa- 
tion is  more  clearly  separable  from  the  secondary 
than  is  the  secondary  from  the  higher  or  university 
stage.  The  chief  cause  for  this  partial  blending,  or 
perhaps  confusion,  of  the  secondary  and  higher  stages 
is  the  college.  However  illogical  and  even  practically 
indefensible  such  a  mixture  may  appear  in  the  eyes 
of  some  very  able  critics,  it  is  still  true  that  this  par- 
tial blending  of  two  different  things,  commonly  and 
wisely  separated  in  other  systems,  has  been  compelled 
by  the  exigencies  of  our  history  and  has  at  the  same 
time  been  fruitful  in  good  results. 

Let  us  then  take  as  the  starting-point  of  our  in- 
quiry the  fact  that  the  American  college,  as  con- 
trasted with  European  schools,  is  a  composite  thing — 
partly  secondary  and  partly  higher  in  its  organiza- 
tion. It  consists  regularly  of  a  four-year  course  of 
study  leading  to  the  bachelor's  degree.  Up  to  the 
close  of  the  Civil  War  it  was  mainly  an  institution 
of  secondary  education,  with  some  anticipations  of 
university  studies  toward  the  end  of  the  course. 
But  even  these  embryonic  university  studies  were 
usually  taught  as  rounding  out  the  course  of  dis- 


THE  AMERICAN  COLLEGE  93 

ciplinary  education,  rather  than  as  subjects  of  free 
investigation.  Boys  entered  college  when  they  were 
fifteen  or  sixteen  years  of  age.  The  age  of  graduation 
did  not  usually  exceed  twenty  years.  The  course  of 
preparation  in  the  best  secondary  schools  occupied 
four  years,  but  many  students  took  only  three  or  even 
two  years.  In  the  better  schools  they  studied  Latin 
and  Greek  grammar,  four  books  of  Csesar,  six  books 
of  Virgil,  six  orations  of  Cicero,  three  books  of 
Xenophon  and  two  of  Homer,  together  with  arith- 
metic, plane  geometry  (not  always  complete)  and 
algebra  to,  or  at  most  through  quadratic  equations. 
There  were  variations  from  this  standard,  but  in 
general  it  may  be  safely  asserted  that  the  Latin, 
Greek,  and  mathematics  specified  above  constituted  as 
much  as  the  stronger  colleges  required  for  entrance; 
while  many  weaker  ones  with  younger  students  and 
lower  standards  were  compelled  to  teach  some  of 
these  preparatory  studies  in  the  first  year  or  even  in 
the  first  two  years  of  the  college  course.  With  but 
few  and  unimportant  exceptions  the  four-year  course 
consisted  of  prescribed  studies.  They  were  English 
literature  and  rhetoric,  Latin,  Greek,  mathematics, 
natural  philosophy,  chemistry,  the  elements  of  deduc- 
tive logic,  moral  philosophy  and  political  economy, 
and  often  a  little  psychology  and  metaphysics.  Per- 
haps  some   ancient  or  general  history  was   added. 


94  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

Prencli  and  German  were  sometimes  taught,  but  not 
to  an  important  degree.  At  graduation  the  student 
received  the  degree  of  bachelor  of  arts,  and  then  en- 
tered on  the  study  of  law,  medicine,  or  theology  at 
some  professional  school,  or  went  into  business  or  into 
teaching  in  the  primary  or  secondary  schools.  Such, 
in  barest  outline,  was  the  scheme  of  college  education 
a  generation  ago. 

THE     COLLEGE    OF    TO-DAY;    PROPOSALS    TO    SHORTEN" 

THE    COURSE 

At  the  present  time  things  are  very  different. 
With  the  vast  growth  of  the  country  in  wealth  and 
population  since  the  Civil  War  there  has  come  a  mani- 
fold development.  The  old  four-year  course,  consist- 
ing entirely  of  a  single  set  of  prescribed  studies  lead- 
ing to  the  one  degree  of  bachelor  of  arts,  has  grown 
and  branched  in  many  ways.  It  has  been  modified 
from  below,  from  above,  and  from  within.  The  bet- 
ter preparation  now  given  in  thousands  of  schools 
has  enabled  colleges  to  ask  for  somewhat  higher  en- 
trance requirements  and,  what  is  more  important,  to 
exact  them  with  greater  firmness.  The  age  of  en- 
trance has  increased,  until  at  the  older  and  stronger 
colleges  the  average  is  now  about  eighteen  and  a  half 
years.  A  four-year  course  leading  to  a  bachelor's  de- 
gree remains,  although  in  some  quarters  the  increas- 


THE  AMERICAN  COLLEGE  95 

ing  age  of  the  students  is  creating  a  tendency  to 
shorten  the  course  to  three  years,  in  order  that  young 
men  may  not  be  kept  back  too  long  from  entering 
upon  their  professional  studies.  It  was  an  easy  thing 
a  generation  ago  for  young  men  to  graduate  at  twenty, 
and  a  bright  man  could  do  it  earlier  without  too  great 
difficulty.  After  two  or  three  years  spent  in  studying 
law  or  medicine  he  was  ready  to  practise  his  profes- 
sion, and  then  began  to  earn  his  living  at  the  age  of 
twenty-two  or  twenty-three.  This  was .  within  his 
reach.  But  to-day  a  college  student  is  twenty-two 
years  old  at  graduation — almost  as  old  as  his  father 
or  grandfather  were  when  they  had  finished  their 
professional  studies.  If  he  follows  in  their  steps,  he 
must  wait  until  he  is  twenty-five  to  begin  earning  his 
living.  Accordingly,  boys  are  now  passing  in  consid- 
erable numbers  directly  from  secondary  schools, 
which  do  not  really  complete  their  secondary  educa- 
tion, to  the  professional  schools,  thus  omitting  college 
altogether.  If  this  continues,  the  effect  both  on  col- 
leges and  professional  schools  will  be  discouraging. 
The  problem  is  an  economic  one,  and  it  is  affecting 
college  courses  of  study.  One  solution,  as  suggested 
above,  is  to  shorten  the  course  to  three  years.  This 
has  been  advocated  by  President  Eliot  of  Harvard. 
Three  years  is  the  length  of  the  course  in  the  under- 
graduate college  established  in  connection  with  the 


96  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

Jolms  Hopkins  University.^  Another  proposal  is  to 
keep  the  four-year  course  and  allow  professional  in 
place  of  liberal  studies  in  the  last  year,  thus  enabling 
the  student  to  save  one  year  in  the  professional  school. 
This  experiment  is  being  tried  at  Columbia.  A  third 
proposal  is  to  keep  the  college  course  absolutely  free 
from  professional  studies,  but  to  give  abundant  op- 
portunities in  the  last  year  or  even  the  last  two  years 
to  pursue  the  liberal  courses  w^iich  most  clearly  un- 
derlie professional  training,  thus  saving  a  year  of 
professional  study.  That  is,  teach  jurisprudence  and 
history,  but  not  technical  law,  or  teach  chemistry  and 
biology,  but  not  technical  medicine,  or  teach  Greek, 
oriental  languages,  history  and  philosophy,  but  not 
technical  theology.  This  seems  to  be  the  trend  of  re- 
cent experiments  in  Yale  and  Princeton.  The  one 
common  consideration  in  favor  of  all  these  proposals 
is  that  a  year  is  saved.  Against  the  three-year  course, 
however,  it  is  argued  that  there  is  no  need  to  abolish 
the  four-year  course  in  order  to  save  a  year.  Against 
the  admission  of  professional  studies  it  is  argued  that 
work  done  in  a  professional  school  ought  not  to  count 
at  the  same  time  toward  two  degrees  representing  two 
radically  different  things.  Against  the  proposal  to 
allow  the  liberal  studies  which  most  closely  underlie 

^  The  undergraduate  college  at  Johns  Hopkins  is  now  placed 
on  a  four-year  basis  (1906). 


THE  AMERICAN  COLLEGE  97 

the  professions,  it  is  argued  that  this  is  a  half-way 
measure,  after  all.  Nevertheless  for  the  present,  and 
probably  for  a  long  time  in  most  colleges,  the  four- 
year  course  is  assured. 

ALTERATIONS   IN   THE   CONTENT   OF   THE    COURSE   AND 
IN    THE    MEANING    OF    THE    BACHELOr's    DEGREE 

The  four-year  course,  however,  no  longer  leads 
solely  to  the  degree  of  bachelor  of  arts,  nor  has  this 
old  degree  itself  remained  unmodified.  With  the 
founding  of  schools  of  science,  aiming  to  give  a  mod- 
ern form  of  liberal  education  based  mainly  on  the 
physical  and  natural  sciences,  and  yet  only  too  often 
giving  under  this  name  a  technological  course,  or  a 
somewhat  incongruous  mixture  of  technical  and  lib- 
eral studies,  the  degree  of  bachelor  of  science  came 
into  use  as  a  college  degree.  Then  intermediate 
courses  were  constituted,  resting  on  Latin,  the  modern 
languages,  history,  philosophy,  mathematics,  and 
science,  and  thus  the  degree  of  bachelor  of  letters  or 
bachelor  of  philosophy  came  into  use.  Sometimes  the 
various  courses  in  civil,  mechanical,  mining  or  elec- 
trical engineering  were  made  four-year  undergradu- 
ate courses  with  their  corresponding  engineering 
degrees  virtually  rated  as  bachelor's  degrees.  Still 
other  degrees  of  lesser  importance  came  into  vogue 
and  obtained  a  footing  here  and  there  as  proper  de- 


98  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

grees  to  mark  the  completion  of  a  four-year  college 
course.  The  dispersing  pressure  of  the  newer  studies 
and  the  imperious  practical  demands  of  American  life 
proved  too  strong  either  to  be  held  in  form  or  to  be 
kept  out  by  the  barriers  of  the  old  course  of  purely  lib- 
eral studies  with  its  single  and  definite  bachelor  of 
arts  degree.  'New  degrees  were  accordingly  added  to 
represent  the  attempted  organization  of  the  newer  ten- 
dencies in  courses  of  study  according  to  their  various 
types.  The  organization  of  such  courses  was  natu- 
rally  embarrassed  by  grave  difiiculties  which  are  as 
yet  only  partially  overcome.  Compared  with  the  old 
course  they  lacked  and  still  lack  definiteness  of  struct- 
ure. They  aimed  to  realize  new  and  imperfectly  un- 
derstood conceptions  of  education,  and  were  composed 
of  studies  whose  inner  content  was  changing  rapidly, 
as  in  the  case  of  the  sciences,  or  else  were  '^  half-and- 
half  "  forms  of  education,  difficult  to  arrange  in  a 
system  that  promised  stability,  as  in  the  case  of 
studies  leading  to  the  bachelor  of  letters  or  bachelor 
of  philosophy.  A  graver  source  of  trouble,  in  view  of 
the  too  fierce  practicality  of  American  life,  was  the 
admission  of  various  engineering  and  other  technical 
studies  as  parallel  undergraduate  courses,  thus  tend- 
ing to  confuse  in  the  minds  of  young  students  the 
radical  distinction  between  liberal  and  utilitarian 
ideals  in  education,  and  tending  furthermore,  by  rea- 


THE  AMERICAN  COLLEGE  99 

son  of  the  attractiveness  of  the  "  bread-and-butter  " 
courses,  to  diminish  the  strength  of  the  liberal  studies. 
When  in  addition  it  is  remembered  that  the  newer 
courses,  whether  liberal,  semiliberal,  or  technical, 
which  found  a  footing  of  presumed  equality  alongside 
of  the  old  bachelor  of  arts  course,  exacted  less  from 
preparatory  schools  in  actual  quantity  of  school-work 
necessary  for  entrance  into  college,  it  will  be  seen 
that  for  the  newer  class  of  students  the  level  of 
preparation  for  college  was  really  lowered. 

The  present  drift  of  opinion  and  action  in  colleges 
which  offer  more  than  one  bachelor's  degree  is  more 
reassuring  than  it  was  some  twenty  years  ago.    There 
is  a  noticeable  tendency,  growing  stronger  each  year, 
to  draw  a  sharper  line  between  liberal  and  technical 
education  and  to  retain  undergraduate  college  educa- 
tion in  liberal  studies  as  the  best  foundation  for 
technical  studies,  thus  elevating  the  latter  to  a  pro- 
fessional dignity  comparable  with  law,  medicine,  and 
divinity.      The  more   this   conception   prevails,   the 
more  will  college  courses  in  engineering  be  converted 
into  graduate,  or  at  least  partially  graduate  courses. 
JSTo  doubt  most  independent  schools  will  continue  to 
offer  their  courses  to  young  students  of  college  age, 
but  where  such  schools  have  been  associated  as  parts 
of  colleges  or  universities  the  tendency  to  a  clearer 
separation  of  technical  from  liberal  studies  in  the 


100  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

manner  indicated  above  seems  likely  to  prevail.  If 
this  happy  result  can  be  considered  assured,  then  the 
undergraduate  college  course,  the  sole  guarantee  of 
American  liberal  culture,  will  have  a  good  chance  to 
organize  itself  in  accordance  with  its  own  high  ideals, 
however  imperfectly  it  may  have  realized  these  ideals 
in  the  past. 

Another  hopeful  tendency  which  is  gradually  gath- 
ering strength  is  to  give  the  various  bachelor's  de- 
grees more  definite  significance  by  making  them 
stand  for  distinct  types  of  liberal  or  semiliberal  edu- 
cation. Three  such  types  or  forms  are  now  slowly 
evolving  out  of  the  mass  of  studies  with  increasing 
logical  consistency.  First  comes  the  historic  aca- 
demic course,  attempting  to  realize  the  idea  of  a  gen- 
eral liberal  education,  and  consisting  of  the  classical 
and  modern  literatures,  mathematics,  and  science, 
with  historical,  political,  and  philosophical  studies 
added,  and  leading  to  the  bachelor  of  arts  degree. 
The  second  is  the  course  which  aims  to  represent  a 
strictly  modern  culture  predominantly  scientific  in 
character,  and  culminating  in  the  degree  of  bachelor 
of  science.  As  this  course  originated  in  the  demand 
for  knowledge  of  the  applied  sciences  in  the  arts  and 
industries  of  modern  life,  the  ideal  of  a  purely  mod- 
ern liberal  culture,  predominantly  scientific  in  spirit, 
was  not  easy  to  maintain.     On  the  contrary,  the  tech- 


THE  AMERICAN  COLLEGE  101 

nical  aspects  of  the  sciences  taught  tended  more  and 
more  to  create  a  demand  for  strictly  technological  in- 
struction to  the  exclusion  of  the  theoretical  and  non- 
technical aspects.  It  is  this  cause  more  than  any 
other  which  has  tended  to  restrict  the  energies  of 
schools  of  science  to  the  production  of  experts  in  the 
various  mechanical  and  chemical  arts  and  industries 
and  has  caused  them  to  do  so  little  for  the  advance- 
ment of  pure  science.  Conscious  of  this  difficulty, 
many  schools  of  science  have  been  giving  larger  place 
in  the  curriculum  to  some  of  the  more  available  hu- 
manistic studies.  Fuller  courses  in  French  and  Ger- 
man have  been  provided  for  and  the  study  of  English 
has  been  insisted  upon  with  sharper  emphasis.  Eco- 
nomics, modern  history,  and  even  the  elements  of 
philosophy  have  found  place.  Some  improvement 
has  also  been  effected  by  increasing  the  entrance  re- 
quirements in  quantity  of  school-work.  But  in  spite 
of  all  these  efforts  the  course  still  suffers  from  an 
inner  antagonism  between  technical  and  liberal  im- 
pulses, and  until  the  bachelor  of  science  course  finally 
settles  into  a  strictly  technical  form,  or  else  comes  to 
represent  a  strictly  liberal  modern  culture,  its  stabil- 
ity cannot  be  regarded  as  assured.  In  the  indepen- 
dent scientific  schools,  unassociated  with  colleges,  it 
seems  probable  the  course  will  keep  or  assume  a  highly 
technical  form,  but  wherever  it  exists  side  by  side 


102  AMERICAN   LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

with  other  bachelor's  courses  as  a  proposed  represent- 
ative of  some  form  of  liberal  education,  it  does  seem 
inevitable  that  it  will  tend  to  conform  to  the  ideal  of 
a  liberal  modern  culture,  mainly  scientific  in  char- 
acter. But  even  if  this  result  be  achieved,  the  proc- 
ess of  achievement  promises  to  be  slow  and  difficult. 
Few  American  colleges  are  strong  enough  financially 
to  make  the  experiment,  which  it  must  be  admitted 
involves  considerable  financial  risk,  and  even  where 
the  risk  may  be  safely  assumed  there  still  remains  a 
serious  theoretical  difficulty  in  realizing  this  form  of 
liberal  education.  The  antagonism  between  the  tech- 
nical and  liberal  impulses  in  the  course  seems  very 
difficult  to  eliminate  completely.  For  if  the  question 
be  asked.  Why  should  an  American  college  student 
seek  as  his  liberal  education  the  studies  which  repre- 
sent a  purely  modern  culture  rather  than  pursue  the 
bachelor  of  arts  course,  which  professes  to  stand  for 
a  more  general  culture  ?  the  preference  of  most  stu- 
dents will  be  found  to  rest  upon  their  instinct  for 
something  useful  and  immediately  available,  rather 
than  on  a  desire  for  things  intellectual.  This  con- 
stantly militates  against  devotion  to  the  intellectual 
value  of  their  modern  studies  and  tends  more  and 
more  to  drag  them  toward  technical  standards. 

The  third  aspirant  to  be  considered  a  type  of  lib- 
eral college  education  is  the  course  intermediate  in 


THE  AMERICAN  COLLEGE  103 

character  between  the  two  already  discussed.  It  is 
labelled  with  the  degree  of  bachelor  of  letters  or  bach- 
elor of  philosophy.  It  differs  from  the  other  two 
courses  mainly  in  its  treatment  of  the  classical  lan- 
guages. In  its  desire  to  placate  the  practical  spirit 
it  drops  Greek,  but  retains  Latin  both  as  an  aid  to 
general  culture  and  as  a  strong  practical  help  in  learn- 
ing the  modern  languages.  JSTotwithstanding  its  in- 
determinate and  intermediate  character,  it  is  serving 
a  valuable  end  by  providing  thousands  of  students, 
who  do  not  care  for  the  classical  languages  in  their 
entirety,  with  a  sufficiently  liberal  form  of  education 
to  be  of  gi'eat  service  to  them.  It  is  by  no  means 
technical  in  spirit.  Judged  from  the  stand-point  of 
the  historic  bachelor  of  arts  course,  it  is  a  less  gen- 
eral but  still  valuable  culture.  Judged  from  the 
stand-point  of  the  bachelor  of  science  course,  it  ap- 
pears to  escape  the  unhappy  conflict  between  the  tech- 
nical and  liberal  impulses  and  anchors  the  student 
somewhat  more  firmly  to  fundamental  conceptions 
of  general  education. 

These  three  are  the  principal  forms  of  undergradu- 
ate college  education  which  in  any  degree  profess  to 
stand  as  types  of  liberal  culture  in  this  country  at  the 
present  time,  and  they  are  usually  labelled  with  three 
different  degrees,  as  already  indicated. 

But  some  colleges,  following  the  example  of  Har- 


104  AJklERICAN   LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

vard,  have  dealt  with  the  bachelor's  degree  very  dif- 
ferently. The  degree  of  bachelor  of  arts  has  been  re- 
tained as  the  sole  symbol  of  liberal  college  education, 
but  the  meaning  of  the  degree  has  been  radically 
altered  in  order  to  make  it  sufficiently  elastic  to  rep- 
resent the  free  selections  and  combinations  made  by 
the  students  themselves  out  of  the  whole  range  of  lib- 
eral studies.  In  these  colleges  it  therefore  no  longer 
stands  for  the  completion  of  a  definite  curriculum 
composed  of  a  few  clearly  related  central  studies  con- 
stituting a  positive  type.  What  it  does  stand  for  is 
not  quite  so  easy  to  define,  because  of  the  variation 
of  practice  in  different  colleges  and  the  wide  diversity 
in  the  choice  of  studies  exercised  by  individual  stu- 
dents in  any  one  college.  But,  generally  speaking,  it 
means  that  the  student  is  free  to  choose  his  own 
studies.  In  the  undergraduate  college  connected  with 
the  Jolms  Hopkins  University  at  Baltimore  choice  is 
regulated  by  prescribing  moderately  elastic  groups  of 
cognate  studies,  the  student  being  required  to  say 
which  grouD  he  will  choose.  In  Harvard  College  the 
range  of  Cx.  ce  is  restricted  in  no  such  way.  The 
student  is  allowed  to  choose  what  he  prefers,  subject 
to  such  limitations  as  the  priority  of  elementary  to 
advanced  courses  in  any  subject,  and  the  necessary 
exclusions  compelled  by  the  physical  necessity  of 
placing  many  exercises  at  the  same  time,  in  order  to 


THE  AMERICAN  COLLEGE  105 

accommodate  the  hundreds  of  courses  offered  within 
the  limits  of  the  weekly  schedule.  In  Columbia  Col- 
lege the  degree  is  still  different  in  respect  to  the  mode 
of  the  student's  freedom  of  choice,  and  especially  in 
the  admission  of  professional  studies  in  the  last  year 
of  the  course.  A  Columbia  student  in  his  senior  year 
may  be  pursuing  his  first  year's  course  in  law  or 
medicine,  and  at  the  same  time  receiving  double 
credit  for  this  work,  both  toward  the  degree  of  bach- 
elor of  arts  and  toward  the  professional  degree  of  doc- 
tor of  medicine  or  bachelor  of  laws.  These  examples 
are  sufficient  to  indicate  the  variety  of  meaning  found 
in  colleges  which  have  changed  the  historical  signifi- 
cance of  the  bachelor  of  arts  degree. 

OTHER  PHASES  OF  CHANGE 

Up  to  this  point  we  have  looked  at  the  American 
college  mainly  from  the  outside.  We  observed  in  the 
college  of  a  generation  ago  an  institution  of  liberal 
education  providing  a  single  four-year  course,  consist- 
ing entirely  of  prescribed  studies  for  youno;  men  from 
sixteen  to  twenty  years  of  age,  and  c  ^ninating  in 
one  bachelor's  degree  of  fairly  uniform  intentional 
meaning.  We  observe  in  the  college  of  to-day  the  de- 
veloped successor  of  the  earlier  college,  providing  a 
four-year  course  consisting  generally  of  a  mixture  of 
prescribed  and  elective  studies  in  widely  varying  pro- 


106  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

portions.  The  average  age  of  the  students  has  in- 
creased nearly  two  years,  and  at  the  end  of  the  course 
there  is  a  multiform  instead  of  a  uniform  bachelor's 
degi'ee,  or  in  some  instances  a  single  bachelor's  degi'ee 
of  multiform  meaning.  To  some  extent  the  under- 
graduate collegian  has  become  a  university  student. 
To  vrhat  extent  ?  is  the  real  question  around  which  a 
controversy  of  vital  importance  is  raging. 

The  profound  change  indicated  by  these  external 
symptoms,  a  change  so  full  of  peril  in  the  directions 
of  disintegration  and  confusion,  and  yet  so  full  of 
promise  if  rationally  organized,  has  been  in  progress 
since  the  Civil  War,  and  is  still  steadily  and  some- 
what blindly  working  along  toward  its  consummation. 
An  exact  estimate  of  such  a  state  of  affairs,  a  diagno- 
sis which  shall  at  the  same  time  have  the  value  of  a 
prognosis  for  all  colleges,  is  manifestly  impossible  at 
the  present  time.  The  difficult  thing  in  any  such  at- 
tempt is  not  merely  to  understand  the  change  from  a 
uniform  to  a  multiform  mode  of  life  and  organiza- 
tion, but  to  understand  what  it  really  is  that  is  chang- 
ing. This  something  that  is  changing  is  the  old-fash- 
ioned American  college.  It  seems  simple  enough  to 
understand  what  this  was,  but  at  the  same  time  it 
needs  to  be  remembered  that  the  old-fashioned 
colleges,  while  aiming  to  follow  out  a  single  course 
of  study  ending  in  a  single  degree  of  single  meaning. 


THE  AJVIERICAN  COLLEGE  107 

nevertheless  did  not  succeed  in  exhibiting  such  close 
individual  resemblance  to'each  other  as  is  to  be  found, 
let  us  say,  among  the  lycees  of  France,  the  public 
schools  of  England,  or  the  gymnasia  of  Germany. 
Many  so-called  colleges  really  served  as  preparatory 
schools  for  larger  and  stronger  colleges,  and  many  so- 
called  universities  did  not  attain  and  in  fact  do  not 
yet  attain  to  the  real,  though  less  pretentious  dignity 
of  the  better  colleges.  In  fact  "  university,"  as 
President  Gilman  observes,  is  too  often  only  a  "  ma- 
jestic synonym  "  for  "  college."  To  aid  in  giving  as 
much  simplicity  and  consequent  clearness  to  our  view 
as  is  necessary  to  disclose  the  leading  features  of  the 
situation,  neglecting  all  the  others,  we  may  therefore 
at  once  discard  from  our  consideration  all  except  the 
better  colleges  which,  when  taken  together,  exhibit  the 
dominant  tendencv. 

How,  then,  have  these  better  colleges  changed? 
Speaking  generally,  they  have  changed  in  a  way 
which  reflects  the  diversified  progress  of  the  country, 
and  yet  in  some  sense  they  have  had  an  important  in- 
fluence in  leading  and  organizing  the  national  prog- 
ress itself.  Then,  too,  the  change  is  not  merely  a 
change  of  form,  but  of  spirit.  In  the  older  days 
scarcely  any  college  had  as  many  as  four  or  five  hun- 
dred students,  and  the  range  of  studies,  even  if  im- 
portant, was  limited.    The  faculty  of  the  college  ex- 


108  AMERICAN   LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

ercised  a  strong  paternal  anxiety  and  oversight  on 
behalf  of  the  morals  and  religion,  as  well  as  over  the 
studies  of  the  students.  The  authority  of  the  presi- 
dent was  almost  patriarchal  in  character,  l^ot  highly 
developed  insight  into  the  problems  of  education,  but 
plain  common-sense  in  governing  students  was  the 
condition  of  a  successful  presidency.  The  life  of  the 
students  was  mildly  democratic,  being  tempered  by 
the  generally  beneficent  absolutism  of  the  president 
and  the  faculty,  which  in  turn  was  itself  tempered  by 
occasional  student  outbreaks.  According  to  the  re- 
port ^  of  the  United  States  Commissioner  of  Educa- 
tion there  were  at  the  end  of  the  century  472  colleges,^ 
excluding  those  for  women  only.  Seventy-seven  of 
these  enrolled  more  than  200  undergraduate  students, 
and  of  these  77  colleges  24  enrolled  over  500,  and  8 
over  1,000.  The  range  of  studies,  as  already  men- 
tioned, has  increased.  With  the  strengthening  of 
preparatory  courses,  the  school  preparation  of  stu- 
dents has  improved,  and  at  the  same  time  their  aver- 
age age  at  entrance  has  risen.  The  number  of  pro- 
fessors has  multiplied.  The  old-fashioned  college 
professor,  the  man  of  moderate  general  scholarship 

^  There  are  over  five  hundred  "colleges  and  universities"  now 
(1906). 

^  That  is,  472  "colleges  and  universities."  As  almost  every 
university,  real  or  nominal,  contains  a  college,  the  total  of  472 
colleges  is  approximately  correct. 


THE  AMERICAN  COLLEGE  109 

and  of  austere  yet  kindly  interest  in  the  personal  wel- 
fare of  those  he  taught,  still  remains ;  but  at  his  side 
has  appeared  more  and  more  frequently  the  newer 
type  of  American  college  professor,  the  man  of  high 
special  learning  in  some  one  subject  or  branch  of  that 
subject,  who  considers  it  his  primary  duty  to  investi- 
gate, his  next  duty  to  teach,  and  his  least  duty  to  ex- 
ercise a  personal  care  for  the  individual  students. 
Perhaps  the  old  type  will  be  replaced  by  the  new. 
Such  a  result,  however,  would  not  be  an  unmixed 
gain,  and  it  is  indeed  fortunate  that  our  finest  college 
professors  to-day  endeavor  to  combine  high  special 
attainments  as  scholars  with  interest  in  the  per- 
sonal well-being  of  their  students.  The  authority  of 
the  faculty  is  still  sufficient,  but  is  exercised  differ- 
ently. Student  self-government  is  the  order  of  the 
day,  and  the  more  this  prevails  the  less  is  exercise  of 
faculty  authority  found  to  be  necessary.  With  stu- 
dent self-government  there  has  naturally  come  an 
increase  of  intensity  in  the  democratic  character  of 
student  life.  The  presidents  of  our  larger  colleges, 
and  even  of  many  of  the  smaller,  are  becoming  more 
and  more  administrative  officers  and  less  and  less 
teachers.  It  is  no  doubt  something  of  a  loss  that  the 
students  should  not  have  the  intimate  personal  ac- 
quaintance with  the  president  enjoyed  by  students  a 
generation  ago,  but  this  cannot  be  avoided  in  places 


110  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

where  a  thousand  undergraduates  are  enrolled.  Out- 
door sports  have  also  entered  to  modify  and  improve 
the  spirit  of  our  academic  life.  Thej  have  developed 
their  own  evils^  but  at  the  same  time  have  done  won- 
ders for  the  physical  health  of  the  students,  the 
diminution  of  student  disorders,  and  the  fostering  of 
an  intense  esprit  de  corps.  In  the  reaction  from  the 
asceticism  of  our  early  college  life  there  is  little  doubt 
our  athletics  have  gone  too  far ;  so  far  as  to  divert  in 
a  noticeable  degree  the  student's  attention  from  his 
studies.  But  it  is  gratifying  to  notice  that  the  abuses 
of  college  athletics  can  be  corrected,  and  that  they  are 
to  some  extent  self-correcting.  It  must  not  be  forgot- 
ten that  unlike  his  father  or  grandfather,  whose  col- 
lege life  was  so  largely  spent  in-doors,  the  American 
student  of  to-day  lives  out-doors  as  much  as  possible. 
The  moral  and  religious  spirit  of  the  college  of  to- 
day is  inlierited  from  the  old  college.  I^early  all  our 
colleges  are  avowedly  or  impliedly  Christian.  A  re- 
spectable minority  of  them  are  Eoman  Catholici  The 
large  majority  are  under  Protestant  influences,  some- 
times denominational,  but  generally  of  an  unsectarian 
character  even  in  the  church  colleges.  In  many  of 
them  the  student  is  expected  to  attend  certain  relig- 
ious exercises,  such  as  morning  prayers;  in  many, 
however,  all  such  attendance  is  voluntary.  The  vol- 
untary religious  life  of  the  undergraduates  finds  its 


THE  AMERICAN  COLLEGE  111 

expression  in  various  societies,  which  endeavor  to 
promate  the  Christian  fellowship  and  life  of  their 
members.  While  moral  and  religious  convictions  are 
freer  and  sometimes  laxer  than  of  old,  the  Christian 
life  in  our  colleges  is  real  and  pervasive. 

As  a  rule  the  student  is  so  absorbed  by  the  scholas- 
tic, athletic,  and  miscellaneous  activities  of  his  college 
that  he  sees  little  outside  social  life.  This  is  particu- 
larly true  in  colleges  which  enjoy  truly  academic 
seclusion  amid  rural  surroundings,  for  here  more 
than  any^vhere  else  is  to  be  seen  the  natural  unper- 
turbed outworking  of  the  undergraduate  spirit.  It 
is  the  old  spirit  enlarged  and  liberalized — the  spirit 
which  finds  its  delight  in  a  free,  democratic,  self- 
respecting  enjoyment  of  the  four  years  which  are  so 
often  looked  back  upon  as  the  happiest  four  years  of 
life. 

INCREASED  FREEDOM  IN  STUDIES.   DEVELOPMENT  OF 

ELECTIVE  COURSES 

Such  are  some  of  the  non-scholastic  aspects  of  our 
present  college  life.  They  are  important  in  that  they 
give  tone  to  the  whole  picture,  but  they  do  not  account 
for  what,  after  all,  is  the  great  transformation  which 
has  been  wrought,  for  that  transformation  is  dis- 
tinctly scholastic.  It  is  caused  by  the  increase  of  stu- 
dents, their  better  preparation,  and  their  greater  age. 


112  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

The  studies  whicli  by  common  consent  made  up  the 
curriculum  leading  to  the  old  bachelor  of  arts  degree 
are  now  being  completed  before  the  end,  sometimes 
by  the  middle  of  the  college  course.  There  is  to-day 
no  reason  why  a  young  man  of  twenty  should  not 
know  as  much  as  his  father  knew  at  twenty.  But  at 
twenty  his  father  had  graduated  with  the  bachelor  of 
arts  degree,  whereas  at  twenty  the  son  is  only  half 
way  through  his  college  course.  In  other  words,  he 
has  passed  the  time  of  prescription  and  entered  upon 
the  time  of  his  freedom.  As  this  fact  forced  itself 
more  and  more  upon  the  older  and  stronger  colleges, 
experiments  were  made  in  granting  a  limited  amount 
of  elective  freedom  to  students  in  the  latter  part  of 
their  course ;  first  in  the  senior  year  and  then  in  the 
junior  year,  until  in  some  instances  the  whole  four- 
year  course  is  now  elective.  The  solid  block  of  four 
years'  prescribed  study  has  been  cleft  downward,  part 
of  the  way  at  least,  by  the  ''  elective  "  wedge,  thin  at 
its  entering  edge,  but  widening  above  the  more  it 
enters  and  descends.  To-day  the  problem  of  the  re- 
lation of  prescribed  to  elective  studies  is  a  question  of 
constant  interest  and  perpetual  readjustment.  On  the 
whole,  the  area  of  elective  opportunity  is  extending 
downward,  but  whether  this  downward  extension  is 
being  accomplished  by  injuring  the  foundations  of 
liberal  education,  is  to-day  as  grave  a  question  as  any 


THE  MIERICAN  COLLEGE  113 

we  have  to  meet.  In  some  colleges  a  student  may  ob- 
tain the  bachelor  of  arts  degree  without  studying  any 
science,  or  he  may  omit  his  classics,  or  he  may  know 
nothing  of  philosophy.  The  solutions  offered  for  this 
perplexing  problem  are  many. 

The  first  proposal,  which  has  now  scarcely  an  ad- 
vocate, except  possibly  some  laudatores  temporis  actiy 
is  plainly  an  impossible  one.  It  is  to  insist  on  the 
old-fashioned  four-year  prescribed  course.  But  the 
old-fashioned  course  is  gone.  It  cannot  be  restored, 
because  it  no  longer  suits  our  age.  Young  men  will 
not  go  to  college  and  remain  there  until  the  age  of 
twenty-two  years  without  some  opportunity  to  exer- 
cise freedom  of  choice  in  their  studies. 

The  second  proposal  is  to  constitute  the  undergrad- 
uate course  entirely,  or  almost  entirely,  of  elective 
studies.  It  is  argued  that  when  a  young  man  is  eigh- 
teen or  nineteen  years  of  age,  he  is  old  enough  to 
choose  his  liberal  studies,  and  that  his  own  choice  will 
be  better  for  him  individually  than  any  prescription 
the  wisest  college  faculty  may  make.  The  advocates 
of  this  view  admit  its  dangers.  They  see  the  perils 
of  incoherency  and  discontinuity  in  the  choice  of 
studies.  They  see  that  many  students  are  influenced, 
not  by  the  intrinsic  value  of  the  studies,  but  by  their 
liking  for  this  or  that  instructor,  or  the  companion- 
ship of  certain  students,  or  for  the  easiness  of  those 


114  AMERICAN   LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

crowded  courses  which  in  college  slang  are  called 
'^  softs  "  or  "  snaps  ''  or  "  cinches.''  Yet  they  argue 
that  the  college  student  must  he  free  at  some  time, 
that  his  sense  of  responsibility  will  be  developed  the 
sooner  he  is  compelled  to  choose  for  himself,  and  that 
he  will  have  the  stimulating  and  sobering  conscious- 
ness that  what  he  does  is  his  own  act  and  not  the  pre- 
scription of  others  for  him.  Those  who  oppose  this 
view  argue  that  the  academic  freedom  here  proposed 
belongs  to  university  rather  than  to  college  students ; 
that  the  American  freshman  is  not  a  university  stu- 
dent in  the  sense  in  which  that  term  has  been  com- 
monly understood  in  the  educated  world.  He  has  not 
spent  eight,  nine,  or  ten  years  in  secondary  studies, 
as  is  the  case  in  France,  England,  or  Germany.  On 
the  contrary,  he  has  usually  spent  not  more  than  four 
years  in  such  secondary  studies — occasionally  a  year 
or  so  more.  At  eighteen  or  nineteen  years  of  age,  he, 
therefore,  comes  to  college  with  less  training  and 
mental  maturity  than  the  French,  English,  or  Ger- 
man youth  possesses  on  entering  his  university.  If, 
therefore,  he  is  to  be  as  well  educated  as  they  are, 
some  of  his  time  in  college,  the  first  two  years  at  least, 
should  be  spent  in  perfecting  his  properly  secondary 
education  before  entering  upon  that  elective  freedom 
which,  as  is  generally  conceded,  has  a  place  and  a 
large  place   in  our  present  undergraduate   courses. 


THE  AMERICAN  COLLEGE  115 

The  arguing  on  this  question  has  been  interminable, 
and  almost  every  intellectual  interest  of  our  colleges 
is  bound  up  in  its  proper  solution. 

A  third  proposal  is  a  conservative  modification  of 
the  one  just  mentioned.  It  is  to  prescribe  groups  of 
cognate  studies  with  the  object  of  concentrating  at- 
tention on  related  subjects  in  that  field  which  the 
student  may  prefer,  as,  for  example,  physical  science 
or  ancient  literature  or  philosophy.  Of  course  the 
advantage  claimed  for  this  mode  is  that  it  allows  the 
student  to  choose  the  field  of  study  he  likes,  and  then 
safeguards  him  against  incoherency  by  requiring  him 
to  pursue  a  group  of  well-related  courses  in  that  field. 
Or  he  may  elect  the  "  old-fashioned  college  course," 
if  he  likes.  The  advocates  of  wider  freedom  object 
to  this  as  fettering  spontaneity  of  choice,  as  not  recog- 
nizing the  fact  that  there  are  many  students  for  whom 
it  is  advantageous  to  choose  a  study  here  and  there  at 
will,  as  a  piece  of  side  work  outside  the  chosen  field 
of  their  activity.  The  objectors  to  this  plan  of  re- 
stricted groups  and  also  to  the  plan  of  practically  un- 
restricted freedom,  assert  that  the  fundamental  diffi- 
culty in  basing  any  college  course  on  a  single  group 
of  cognate  studies  within  some  one  field  is  that  it 
offers  temptations  to  premature  specialization  at  the 
expense  of  liberal  education. 

Still  another  proposal  remains  to  be  considered.    It 


116  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

is  the  proposal  of  those  who  believe  that  the  best  type 
of  liberal  education  is  to  be  found  in  the  historic 
bachelor  of  arts  course,  which  has  been  the  centre  and 
strength  of  American  college  life.      They  concede, 
however,  that  the  other  bachelor's  courses  which  have 
been  established  will  give  a  valuable  education  to 
many,  provided  these  courses  are  consistently  organ- 
ized according  to  their  own  ideals.     They  hold  that  it 
is  possible  to  ascertain  with  sufficient  exactness  just 
what  studies  ought  to  be  prescribed  as  integral  parts 
of  these  courses,  and  that  it  is  the  preliminary  train- 
ing given  in  these  prescribed  studies  which  develops 
maturity  in  the  young  student  and  enables  him  to 
choose  intelligently  his  later  elective  studies.     At  the 
present  time,  in  their  view,  it  is  not  wise  to  introduce 
elective  studies  until  about  the  middle  of  the  college 
course.    These  studies,  once  introduced,  should  them- 
selves be  organized  and  related  in  a  system,  and  con- 
nected  with   the    underlying    system   of    prescribed 
studies.     The  principle  of  freedom  should  be  intro- 
duced gradually,  not  suddenly.    A  form  of  this  view 
which  finds  a  good  deal  of  support  is  that  elective 
studies  should  be  introduced  first  of  all  in  the  form 
of  extensions  of  subjects  already  studied  by  the  stu- 
dent, in  order  that  he  may  make  his  first  experiment 
of  choice  in  an  area  where  he  is  most  familiar.     Ac- 
cording  to   this  view  the   second   stage   of  elective 


THE  AMERICAN  COLLEGE  117 

studies  should  be  the  introduction  of  large  general 
courses  in  leading  subjects,  accompanied  or  flanked 
by  special  courses  for  students  of  exceptional  ability 
in  special  directions,  and  finally  leading  to  as  high  a 
degree  of  specialization  as  the  resources  of  the  college 
will  allow. 

But  in  this  region  the  American  college  merges 
itself  into  the  university,  and  it  may  be  fairly  asserted 
that  in  the  last  year  and  in  some  colleges  in  the  last 
two  years  the  student  is  really  a  university  student. 
In  these  various  ways  we  are  to-day  experimenting  in 
order  to  find  a  form  under  which  to  organize  the  rap- 
idly increasing  mass  of  elective  studies. 

MODES   OF  INSTRUCTION.      ACADEMIC   HONORS 

Instruction  is  still  mainly  conducted  by  recitation 
and  lecture,  the  recitation  finding  its  chief  place  in 
the  earlier  and  the  lecture  in  the  later  part  of  the 
course.  For  purposes  of  recitation  the  classes  are 
divided  into  sections  of  twenty-five  or  thirty  students, 
and  the  exercise  is  usually  based  on  a  definitely  al- 
lotted portion  of  some  standard  text-book.  Much  has 
been  done  to  improve  the  character  of  this  exercise. 
The  attempt  is  made  to  make  it  something  more  vital 
than  the  mere  listening  to  students  as  they  recite  what 
they  have  learned.  The  correction  of  mistakes,  the 
attempt  to  lead  the  student  along  so  as  to  discover  for 


118  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

himself  the  cause  of  his  mistakes,  the  endeavor  to 
teach  the  entire  class  through  the  performance  of  each 
individual,  to  carry  the  whole  group  along  as  one  man 
and  thus  conduct  them  through  a  stimulating  and 
pleasant  hour,  is  the  aim  of  the  more  skilful  instruc- 
tors. Variety  and  consequent  freshening  of  attention 
and  effort  are  added  by  setting  collateral  topics  of 
special  interest  to  this  or  that  student,  for  him  to 
look  up  somewhat  independently.  And  it  must  be 
confessed  that  the  professors  most  skilled  in  the  art 
of  conducting  recitations,  rather  than  those  who  de- 
pend wholly  on  lectures,  leave  the  most  abiding  im- 
pression. The  old-fashioned  recitation  too  often  put 
the  student  into  a  laborious  treadmill,  and  monot- 
ony was  the  result.  But  the  best  recitations  in  our 
colleges  to-day  are  fine  examples  of  dialectic  play 
between  instructor  and  student,  and  the  best  moments 
of  such  exercises  are  remembered  with  enthusiasm. 
While  instruction  by  recitation  continues  with  effec- 
tiveness in  the  latter  part  of  the  course,  especially  with 
smaller  groups  of  students,  yet  instruction  by  lecture 
is  the  rule.  The  lecturer  may  have  to  face  a  class 
which  enrolls  as  many  students  as  the  w^hole  college 
contained  a  generation  ago.  Two  or  three  hundred 
may  assemble  to  hear  him.  He  delivers  his  lecture, 
while  those  before  him  take  notes  or  sometimes,  as 
they  listen,  read  the  outline  of  his  discourse  in  a 


THE  AMERICAN  COLLEGE  119 

printed  syllabus  prepared  for  the  use  of  the  class,  and 
add  such  jottings  as  may  seem  desirable.  In  many 
lecture  courses  the  recitation  is  employed  as  an 
effective  auxiliary. 

But  other  forms  of  instruction  find  place.  In  all 
except  the  elementary  courses  in  science  the  labora- 
tory plays  a  most  important  part,  and  even  in  the 
lectures  in  the  introductory  courses  in  physics,  chem- 
istry, or  biology  full  experimental  illustration  is  the 
rule.  Then,  too,  the  library  serves  as  a  sort  of  labora- 
tory for  the  humanistic  studies.  Students  are  en- 
couraged to  learn  the  use  of  the  college  library  as  aux- 
iliary to  the  regular  exercises  of  the  curriculum. 
Certain  books  are  appointed  as  collateral  reading,  and 
the  written  examination  at  the  end  of  the  term  often 
takes  account  of  this  outside  reading.  But  Ameri- 
can students  read  too  little.  That  prolonged  reading, 
which  gives  such  wide  and  assuring  acquaintance 
with  the  important  literature  of  any  subject,  is  as  yet 
imattempted  in  a  really  adequate  degree.^ 

The  academic  year  is  divided  into  two,  and  some- 
times into  three  terms.  At  the  end  of  each  term  the 
student  is  required  to  pass  a  fairly  rigorous  set 
of  written  examinations.  Oral  examinations  have 
largely  disappeared.    Sometimes  a  high  record  of  at- 

^The  preceptorial  plan  in  Princeton,  introduced  in  1905,  is 
intended  to  develop  extensive  and  critical  reading  alongside  the 
courses  of  instruction. 


120  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

tainment  in  recitations  during  the  term  entitles  a  stu- 
dent to  exemption  from  examination,  but  this  is  not 
common.  In  awarding  honors  for  scholarly  pro- 
ficiency the  old  academic  college  confined  itself  almost 
entirely  to  general  honors  for  eminence  in  the  whole 
round  of  studies.  The  ^'  first  honor-man  "  in  older 
days  was  the  hero  and  pride  of  his  class.  At  gradua- 
tion he  usually  delivered  the  valedictory  or  else  the 
Latin  salutatory.  Honors  for  general  eminence  still 
remain  in  most  colleges.  The  rank  list  of  the  class  at 
graduation  either  arranges  the  students  in  ordinal 
position  (in  which  case  the  first  honor-man  still  ap- 
pears) or  else  divides  the  class  into  a  series  of  groups 
arranged  in  order  of  general  scholarly  merit.  In  such 
cases  the  old  first  honor-man  is  one  of  the  select  few 
who  constitute  the  highest  group  in  the  class.  But 
special  honors  in  particular  studies,  while  not  un- 
known in  the  past,  are  really  a  development  of  our 
time.  Undoubtedly  they  have  tended  to  increase  the 
interest  of  abler  students  in  their  favorite  studies.  A 
student  trying  for  special  honors  is,  of  course,  special- 
izing in  some  sense,  though  he  is  not  ordinarily  pur- 
suing original  research.  He  is  rather  enlarging  and 
deepening  his  acquaintance  with  some  one  important 
subject,  such  as  history  or  mathematics.  But  some- 
times he  is  beginning  independent  investigation,  and 
thus  passes  beyond  the  collegiate  sphere  of  study. 


THE  AMERICAN  COLLEGE  121 

STUDENT    LIFE 

Let  US  try  to  picture  the  career  of  a  young  Ameri- 
can of  the  usual  type  at  one  of  our  older  Eastern  col- 
leges to-day.  At  eighteen  years  of  age  he  has  com- 
pleted a  four-year  course  in  some  secondary  school, 
let  us  say  at  a  private  academy  in  the  Middle  States, 
or  some  flourishing  Western  high  school.  He  does  not 
need  to  make  the  long  journey  to  his  future  college  in 
order  to  be  examined  for  entrance,  but  finds  in  the 
distant  town  where  he  lives,  or  at  least  in  some  neigh- 
boring city,  a  local  entrance  examination  conducted 
by  a  representative  of  his  intended  college.  The  days 
and  exact  hours  of  examination  and  the  examination 
papers  are  the  same  as  for  the  examination  held  at 
the  college.  His  answers  are  sent  on  to  be  marked 
and  estimated.  In  a  fortnight  or  so  he  receives  notice 
of  his  admission  to  the  freshman  class. 

When  the  long  summer  vacation  is  over  he  sets  out 
for  his  college.  Having  passed  his  entrance  examina- 
tions, he  is  now  entitled  to  secure  rooms  in  one  of  the 
dormitories,  or  else  to  find  quarters  outside  the  college 
campus  in  town.  His  name  is  duly  enrolled  in  the 
matriculation  book  and  his  student  career  begins.  He 
usually  comes  with  an  earnest  purpose  to  study,  or  at 
least  to  be  regular  in  all  his  attendance.  His  newness 
and  strangeness  naturally  pick  him  out  for  a  good 


122  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

deal  of  notice  on  the  part  of  the  older  students,  es- 
pecially those  of  the  sophomore  class.  lie  is  subjected 
to  some  good-natured  chaffing  and  guying,  and  per- 
haps to  little  indignities.  If  he  takes  it  good-natur- 
edly, the  annoyance  soon  ceases.  If,  however,  he 
shows  himself  bumptious  or  opinionated  or  vain  or 
"  very  fresh,"  his  troubles  are  apt  to  continue.  Un- 
fortunately it  is  not  impossible  they  will  culminate  in 
some  act  of  mean  bullying,  known  in  college  parlance 
as  "  hazing."  The  entering  freshman  is  too  often  like 
the  newly  arrived  slave  mentioned  in  Tacitus  — 
conservis  ludibrio  est;  and  it  would  be  little  comfort 
for  him  to  know  that  in  this  respect  he  is  also  a  lineal 
successor  of  the  hejaunus,  the  freshman  "  fledgling  " 
among  the  students  of  mediaeval  Paris.  But  the  daily 
round  of  college  exercises  demands  his  attention,  and 
in  the  classroom  he  begins  to  pass  through  a  process 
of  attrition  more  beneficent  in  its  spirit.  Under  the 
steady  measuring  gaze  of  the  instructor,  and  the  un- 
uttered  but  very  real  judgment  of  his  classmates  who 
sit  about  him,  he  begins  to  measure  himself  and  to  be 
measured  by  college  standards.  Probably  for  the  first 
time  in  his  life  he  is  compelled  to  recognize  that  he 
must  stand  solely  on  his  merits.  The  helps  and  con- 
solations of  home  and  of  the  limited  circle  in  which 
his  boyhood  was  fostered  and  sheltered  are  far  away. 
He  is  learning  something  not  down  in  the  books !  and 


THE  AMERICAN  COLLEGE  123 

what  he  is  thus  discovering  is  well  pictured  in  the 
words  of  Professor  Hibben :  "  There  is  a  fair  field  to 
all  and  no  favor.  Wealth  does  not  make  for  a  man 
nor  the  lack  of  it  against  him.  The  students  live  their 
lives  upon  one  social  level.  There  is  a  deep-seated  in- 
tolerance of  all  snobbishness  and  pretension.  The 
dictum  of  the  'varsity  field,  '  ISTo  grand-stand  play- 
ing ! '  obtains  in  all  quarters  of  the  undergraduate 
life.  It  signifies  no  cant  in  religion ;  no  pedantry  in 
scholarship;  no  affectation  in  manners;  no  pretence 
in  friendship.  This  is  the  first  and  enduring  lesson 
which  the  freshman  must  learn.  He  learns  and  he 
forgets  many  other  lessons,  but  this  must  be  held  in 
lively  remembrance  until  it  has  become  a  second 
nature."  But  he  has  many  encouragements.  He  is 
passing  out  of  callow  youth  toward  manhood,  and  his 
classmates  are  in  the  same  situation  w^ith  him.  Here 
is  the  impulse  which  suddenly  sweeps  the  whole  en- 
tering class  together  in  intimate  comradeship.  And 
so  he  starts  out  with  his  companions  on  the  ups  and 
downs  of  his  four-year  journey.  No  wonder  so  many 
college  graduates  say  freshman  year  was  the  most 
valuable  of  all — it  was  surely  the  hardest.  His  col- 
lege comradeship  continues  and  constitutes  his  social 
world.  Day  after  day,  term  after  term,  they  are 
thrown  together  in  all  the  relationships  of  student 
life.     In  the  classroom,  at  the  "  eating  clubs,"  at  the 


124  MIERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

athletic  games,  in  the  musical,  literary,  and  religious 
societies,  in  scenes  of  exuberant  jollification  and  care- 
less disorder,  and  in  endless  criticism  of  the  faculty 
or  of  the  various  courses  of  study,  how  their  frank  and 
unconventional  ways  constantly  surprise  and  be- 
wilder the  commonplace  American  philistine!  You 
may  pass  across  the  lawns  of  many  a  campus  at  any 
hour  of  the  day  and  almost  any  hour  of  the  night  in 
term-time,  and  rarely  is  there  a  time  when  some  stu- 
dent life  is  not  astir.  Some  are  thronging  toward  the 
lecture-hall  to  the  punctual  ringing  of  the  college 
bell,  meeting  returning  throngs  whose  exercises  are 
just  finished.  They  are  walking  by  twos  or  threes, 
smoking  or  chatting  or  mildly  "  playing  horse  "  in 
some  very  pleasant  way,  unmindful  and  probably  un- 
aware of  Lord  Chesterfield's  horrified  injunction  to 
his  son :  "  No  horse-play,  I  beseech  of  you."  Or  they 
are  thronging  to  fill  the  "  bleachers  "  at  a  base-ball  or 
foot-ball  game  that  is  about  to  be  played  on  the  college 
grounds.  The  different  varieties  of  the  college  cheer 
startle  the  air,  and  afford  some  color  of  excuse  to  the 
ingenious  hypothesis  that  our  student  cheers  are  de- 
rived from  Indian  war-whoops.  Or  else  when  they 
are  assembled  in  Sunday  chapel,  a  decorous  but  not 
always  solemn  audience,  their  capacity  for  "  simulta- 
neous emotion  "  appears  in  their  spirited  singing  of  a 
favorite  hymn,  or  perhaps  shows  itself  in  the  sudden 


THE  AMERICAN  COLLEGE  125 

sensation  that  sweeps  across  the  chapel  like  a  lightly 
rustling  breeze  in  response  to  an  inopportune  remark 
of  some  inexperienced  visiting  clergyman.  Or  in  the 
moonlit  evenings  of  October,  the  time  when  the  trees 
are  turning  red  and  yellow,  their  long  processions 
pass  to  and  fro,  singing  college  songs.  Truly  the 
American  collegian  is  brimful  of  the  "  gTegarious 
instinct.'' 

In  addition  to  this  ever-present  gregarious  com- 
radeship which  environs  and  inspires  him,  our  enter- 
ing freshman  finds  the  deeper  intimacies  of  close  in- 
dividual friendship.  As  a  matter  of  course  he  has 
some  one  most  intimate  friend,  generally  his  room- 
mate or  "  chum."  Side  by  side,  they  mingle  with 
their  fellows.  They  stand  together  and,  it  may  be, 
they  fall  together,  and  then  rise  together.  And  thus 
the  class  is  paired  off,  and  yet  not-to  the  lessening  of 
the  deep  class  fellowship.  Here  indeed  is  a  form  of 
communism,  temporary  and  local,  but  most  intense. 
They  freely  use  things  in  common,  not  excepting  the 
property  of  the  college.  The  distinction  between 
mev,m  and  tuum  does  not  hold  rigorously.  Ta  r&v 
<f)L\cov  Koiva  said  the  ancient  poet,  and  so  say  they. 
Accordingly  a  desirable  hat  or  scarf  or  some  article  of 
athletic  costume  changes  ownership  again  and  again, 
with  nothing  sought  in  return.  They  are  welcome 
to  enter  one  another's  rooms  at  pleasure  and  use  their 


126  AMERICAN   LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

friends'  tobacco  and  stationery,  or  to  borrow  such 
articles  of  furniture  and  bric-a-brac  as  will  brighten 
their  own  rooms  for  some  special  occasion.  The 
doors  of  their  apartments  are  commonly  left  open; 
sometimes  a  latch-string  is  ingeniously  arranged  so 
the  door  can  be  opened  from  the  outside.  Money, 
however,  stands  on  a  different  basis  from  other  valu- 
ables. It  is  freely  loaned  for  an  indefinite  time,  but 
is  strictly  repaid.  A  student  w^io  lends  his  fellow 
money  at  interest  cannot  live  in  a  college  community. 

Our  student,  unless  he  is  an  unusual  recluse,  takes 
some  part  in  athletics.  If  he  is  not  able  to  win  a 
place  on  the  foot-ball  team  or  base-ball  nine  or  crew, 
which  represents  his  alma  mater  in  intercollegiate 
contests,  he  is  very  likely  to  be  found  playing  ball  in 
some  organization  improvised  for  the  day,  or  trying 
his  hand  at  tennis  or  golf.  The  bicycle  is  a  necessity 
of  his  life,  and  on  it  he  rides  to  recitations  and  lect- 
ures, to  his  meals  and  to  the  athletic  field. 

He  has  still  other  interests  outside  the  curriculum. 
He  may  be  a  member  of  the  voluntary  religious  so- 
ciety of  the  students.  Perhaps  he  gets  a  place  on  the 
glee  club  or  dramatic  club.  He  may  become  one  of 
the  editors  of  the  daily  college  paper  or  of  the 
monthly  literary  magazine.  Perhaps  he  is  manager 
or  assistant  business  manager  for  one  or  another  un- 
dergraduate organization.     Then  there  are  the  whist 


THE  AMERICAN  COLLEGE  127 

clubs  and  time-consuming  chess  clubs.  There  are 
also  circles  for  outside  reading  and  discussion  spring- 
ing up  around  the  course  of  study,  as  well  as  the  so- 
cieties which  train  in  speaking  and  debating.  Per- 
haps he  may  win  the  distinction  of  representing  his 
college  in  an  intercollegiate  debate,  and  success  in 
intercollegiate  debating  is  highly  coveted.  The  con- 
testants are  greatly  honored,  for  debating  and  ath- 
letics form  the  principal  bond  of  union  between  the 
different  colleges  and  give  to  their  participants  inter- 
collegiate distinction. 

Until  the  student  passes  out  of  freshman  year,  he 
is  not  always  free  to  choose  what  kind  of  clothes  he 
will  wear.  A  freshman  wearing  a  tall  hat  and  carry- 
ing a  walking-stick  is  an  offence  to  the  other  classes. 
In  some  colleges  freshmen  are  not  allowed  to  wear  the 
colors,  except  on  rare  occasions.  But  as  soon  as  he 
becomes  a  sophomore  he  is  free  to  do  as  he  likes. 
Then  he  and  his  classmates  may  suddenly  appear 
wearing  various  hats,  picturesque  and  often  grotesque 
in  appearance,  and  revel  particularly  in  golfing  suits. 
Toward  the  close  of  the  course  their  daily  dress  be- 
comes more  conventional,  though  the  universal  in- 
terest in  athletics  continues  to  affect  the  student  mode 
all  the  way  to  the  end.  He  has  other  amusements 
besides  athletics,  and  these  again  are  found  in  the 
student  circle.     His  briarwood  pipe  goes  with  him 


128  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

almost  everywhere.  He  smokes  as  he  studies;  he 
smokes  at  the  games.  Seated  side  by  side  with  thou- 
sands of  other  students  and  alumni  at  the  great  in- 
tercollegiate matches,  he  helps  form  the  fragrant 
cloud  of  blue  incense  that  rises  from  the  "  bleachers  ^' 
and  drifts  over  the  field.  In  the  evening,  when  the 
work  of  the  scholastic  day  is  done,  he  sits  with  his 
comrades  at  an  unconventional  ^^  smoker,"  or  else 
they  may  gather  round  the  table  of  some  restaurant 
with  pipe  and  "  stein  " ;  for  the  American  student 
who  drinks  at  all  prefers  beer  to  either  wine  or 
whiskey.  At  such  evening  sessions  the  different 
phases  of  student  politics  are  discussed  again  and 
again.  College  songs  are  sung,  the  air  being  carried 
in  that  sonorous  baritone  which  is  the  dominant 
sound  in  all  our  student  music.  Tales  and  jests  fill 
out  the  hour.  At  the  end  the  college  cheer  is  given 
as  the  men  start  strolling  homeward,  singing  as  they 
go.  Arrived  on  the  campus  they  disperse,  and  their 
good-night  calls  echo  from  the  doors  and  windows  of 
the  different  dormitories.  And  so  the  day  ends 
where  it  began ;  within  that  closed  circle  where  every 
student  lives  in  "  shouting  distance  "  of  the  others. 
Our  former  freshman  is  getting  on  bravely  toward 
the  end  of  his  course.  He  is  now  a  free,  familiar, 
established  denizen  of  his  college.  He  "  owns  "  it. 
ISTew  freshmen,  unpleasantly  raw  and  needing  to  be 


THE  AMERICAN  COLLEGE  129 

taught  their  place — new  freshmen  so  different  from 
what  he  is  and  yet  so  like  what  he  once  was,  are 
crowding  in  at  the  bottom  of  the  course.  They  look 
up  to  him  and  his  compeers  in  the  senior  class  with 
no  little  awe  and  hope.  What  he  is,  they  may  become. 
In  him  they  "  see  their  finish."  In  them  he  reluct- 
antly recalls  his  beginnings.  The  closing  months  of 
senior  year  pass  swiftly.  His  class  procession  is  pre- 
paring to  march  out  into  the  world  and  there  take  its 
place  as  a  higher  order  of  freshmen  in  the  long  file  of 
the  classes  of  alumni  advancing  with  their  thinning 
ranks  toward  middle  manhood  and  beyond  —  and 
when  commencement  is  over  his  undergraduate  life 
is  ended. 

What  has  he  acquired  in  the  four  years  ?  At  least 
some  insight  into  the  terms  and  commonplaces  of  lib- 
eral learning  and  some  discipline  in  the  central  cate- 
gories of  knowledge,  some  moral  training  acquired 
in  the  punctual  performance  of  perhaps  unwelcome 
daily  duty  and  some  reverence  for  things  intellectual 
and  spiritual.  He  is  not  only  a  very  different  man 
from  what  he  was  when  he  entered,  but  very  different 
from  what  he  could  have  become  had  he  not  entered. 
He  is  wiser  socially.  He  is  becoming  cosmoix)litan. 
Awkwardness,  personal  eccentricity,  conceit,  diffi- 
dence, and  all  that  is  callow  or  froward  or  perverse 
has  been  taken  from  him,  so  far  as  the  ceaseless  at- 


130  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

trition  of  his  fellow  students  and  professors  has 
touched  him.  He  has  been  unconsciously  developed 
into  the  genuine  collegian.  He  is  still  frank  and  un- 
conventional. But  he  has  become  more  tolerant,  bet- 
ter balanced,  more  cultivated  and  more  open- 
minded,  and  thus  better  able  to  direct  himself  and 
others.  This  is  the  priceless  service  his  college  has 
rendered  him.  It  is  little  wonder  his  student  affilia- 
tions last.  As  he  goes  out  to  take  his  place  among  the 
thousands  of  his  fellow  alumni,  it  is  natural  that  his 
and  their  filial  devotion  to  their  academic  mother 
should  last  through  life.  He  will  return  with  his 
class  at  their  annual  or  triennial  or  decennial  or  later 
pilgrimages  to  the  old  place.  !N'o  matter  what  uni- 
versity he  may  subsequently  attend,  here  or  abroad, 
his  college  allegiance  remains  unshaken.  It  is  this 
which  explains  the  active  interest  shown  by  our 
alumni.  In  the  best  sense  they  advertise  their  college 
to  the  public,  and  it  is  to  their  exertions  the  recent 
rapid  advancement  of  many  of  our  colleges  is  largely 
due. 

ORGAi;riZATION   AND   ADMINISTRATION.      STUDENT 

EXPENSES 

The  form  of  government  is  simple.  A  college  cor- 
poration, legally  considered,  consists  of  a  body  of 
men  who  have  obtained  the  charter,  and  who  hold  and 


THE  AMERICAN   COLLEGE  131 

administer  the  property.  "Where  a  particular  state 
has  established  a  college  or  even  a  university,  which 
regularly  includes  a  college,  the  members  of  the  cor- 
poration are  commonly  styled  regents,  and  are  ap- 
pointed by  the  state  to  hold  office  for  a  limited  term 
of  years.  But  most  colleges  have  been  established  as 
private  corporations.  In  this  case  the  title  is  vested 
in  a  board  of  trustees,  sometimes  composed  of  mem- 
bers who  hold  office  for  life,  or  else  composed  of  these 
associated  with  others  who  are  elected  for  a  term  of 
years.  Boards  of  trustees  holding  office  for  life  usu- 
ally constitute  a  close  corporation,  electing  their  own 
successors  as  vacancies  occur.  The  two  chief  func- 
tions of  such  governing  bodies,  whether  kno^vn  as 
regents  or  trustees  or  by  any  other  name,  are  to  safe- 
guard the  intent  of  the  charter  and  to  manage  the 
property.  They  give  stability  to  our  college  system. 
To  carry  out  the  main  purpose  for  which  the  charter 
was  obtained  they  create  a  faculty  of  professors  and 
instructors  and  intrust  the  general  headship  to  a 
president.  The  president  and  professors  usually  hold 
office  for  life.  In  some  places  provision  is  beginning 
to  be  made  for  the  retirement  of  professors  on  pen- 
sions as  they  grow  old.  Instructors  and  sometimes 
assistant  professors  are  appointed  for  a  limited  time, 
such  appointments  being  subject  to  renewal  or  pro- 
motion.    In  the  larger  colleges  the  president  is  as- 


132  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

sisted  in  liis  administrative  work  by  one  or  more 
deans.  By  immemorial  tradition  the  president  and 
faculty  are  charged  with  the  conduct  of  the  entire  in- 
struction and  discipline.  They  have  the  power  to 
admit  and  dismiss  students.  The  conferring  of  de- 
gTees  belongs  to  the  corporation,  but  this  power  is 
almost  invariably  exercised  according  to  recommen- 
dations made  by  the  faculty.  Honorary  degrees, 
however,  are  sometimes  given  by  the  trustees  or  re- 
gents on  their  own  initiative. 

In  state  colleges  the  income  is  derived  from  taxa- 
tion ;  in  others  from  endowments,  often  supplemented 
by  annual  subscriptions  for  special  purposes.  The 
increase  of  income  of  a  college  founded  by  a  state  de- 
pends on  the  increase  of  the  wealth  of  the  state  and 
the  liberality  of  disposition  shown  by  the  legislature. 
State  colleges  receive  few  private  gifts.  But  the 
private  colleges  are  cut  off  from  dependence  on  the 
state,  and  have  to  rely  on  private  gifts.  This  stream 
of  private  liberality  flows  almost  unceasingly.  The 
fact  that  many  colleges  are  integral  parts  of  real  or  so- 
called  universities  makes  it  difficult  to  say  how  much 
the  specifically  collegiate  endowments  and  incomes 
amount  to.  But  a  few  significant  facts  may  be  men- 
tioned. 'No  college  president,  unless  he  is  at  the 
same  time  the  president  of  a  university,  receives  as 
high  a  salary  as  $10,000   annually.      He  is  more 


THE  AMERICAN  COLLEGE  133 

likely  to  receive  $4,000,  $5,000,  or  $6,000.  Two 
thousand  dollars  is  considered  a  good  professor's 
salary  in  small  colleges ;  $3,000  is  a  usual  salary  in 
the  larger  colleges,  while  few  professors  receive  more 
than  $4,000. 

The  expenses  of  individual  students  vary  greatly. 
In  some  places  there  is  no  charge  for  tuition;  in 
others  they  must  pay  as  much  as  $100  or  $150.  In 
little  country  colleges  the  total  cost  for  a  year  often 
falls  within  $300 ;  in  the  larger  old  Eastern  colleges, 
drawing  patronage  from  all  parts  of  the  land,  the 
student  who  must  pay  all  his  bills  and  receives  no  aid 
in  the  form  of  a  scholarship  can  hardly  get  along  with 
less  than  $600  or  $700,  exclusive  of  his  expenses  in 
the  summer  vacation.  The  average  expenses  in  some 
of  the  oldest  colleges,  according  to  tables  prepared  by 
successive  senior  classes,  is  higher  than  this,  running 
up  to  $800  or  $900,  or  even  more.  But  these  insti- 
tutions afford  the  student  of  limited  means  multi- 
plied opportunities  for  self-help.  There  are  many 
instances  where  bright  boys  have  been  able  to  win 
their  way  through,  standing  high  in  their  classes  and 
at  the  same  time  supporting  themselves  entirely  by 
their  own  exertions.  Moreover  many  colleges  possess 
scholarships  which  are  open  to  able  students  who 
need  temporary  pecuniary  help.  The  young  Ameri- 
can of  narrow  means,  if  he  be  of  fair  ability  and  in- 


134  AMERICAN  LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

dustrj,  can  almost  always  manage  to  find  his  way 
through  college. 

THE    COLLEGE    IS    AMERICAIT 

The  college  lies  very  close  to  the  people.  Distinc- 
tions of  caste  may  manifest  themselves  occasionally, 
and  yet  the  college  is  stoutly  and  we  believe  perma- 
nently democratic.  Its  relation  to  the  better  side  of 
our  national  life  has  been  profoundly  intimate  from 
the  beginning.  The  graduates  of  Harvard  and  Yale 
in  !N'ew  England,  of  Princeton  and  Columbia  in  the 
Middle  States,  and  of  the  College  of  William  and 
Mary  in  Virginia  contributed  powerfully  to  the 
formation  of  our  Republic.  Edmund  Burke  attrib- 
uted the  "  intractable  spirit "  of  the  Americans  to 
"  their  education,''  and  by  this  he  meant  the  college 
education.  ^'  The  colleges,"  wrote  President  Stiles 
of  Yale  shortly  after  the  Revolution,  "  have  been  of 
signal  advantage  in  the  present  day.  When  Britain 
withdrew  all  her  wisdom  from  America  this  Revolu- 
tion found  above  two  thousand  in  JS^ew  England  only, 
who  had  been  educated  in  the  colonies,  intermingling 
with  the  people  and  communicating  knowledge  among 
them."  John  Adams  of  Harvard  delighted  to  find 
in  President  Witherspoon  of  Princeton  "  as  high  a 
son  of  liberty  as  any  in  America."  Hampden-Sidney 
College  in  Virginia,  founded  about  the  time  of  the 


THE  AMERICAN  COLLEGE  135 

Revolution,  incorporated  in  its  charter  the  following 
clause :  "In  order  to  preserve  in  the  minds  of  the 
students  that  sacred  love  and  attachment  which  they 
should  ever  bear  to  the  principles  of  the  ever-glorious 
Revolution,  the  greatest  care  and  caution  shall  be  used 
in  selecting  such  professors  and  masters,  to  the  end 
that  no  person  shall  be  so  elected  unless  the  uniform 
tenor  of  his  conduct  manifest  to  the  world  his  sincere 
affection  for  the  liberty  and  independence  of  the 
United  States  of  America."  And  from  that  day  to 
this  the  collegiate  spirit  and  the  national  spirit  have 
been  at  one.  Rightly,  indeed,  did  our  appreciative 
French  visitor,  Baron  Pierre  de  Coubertin,  perceive 
that  the  place  to  find  "  the  true  Americans  '^  is  in  our 
college  halls;  "  Zes  vrais  AmericainSj  la  base  de  la 
nation^  Vespoir  de  Vavenlr.^^  Scarcely  one  in  a  hun- 
dred of  our  white  male  youth  of  college  age  has  gone 
to  college.  But  this  scanty  contingent  has  furnished 
one-half  of  all  the  presidents  of  the  United  States, 
most  of  the  justices  of  the  Supreme  Court,  not  far 
from  one-half  of  the  Cabinet  and  of  the  national 
Senate,  and  almost  a  third  of  the  House  of  Represent- 
atives. ISTo  other  single  class  of  equal  numbers  has 
been  so  potent  in  our  national  life. 


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BERKELEY 

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